Marsha Hunt - Like Venus Fading

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 six, I imagined that it was the O’Brien murder which threw the entire world into chaos.

I recall Mack’s arrest like it happened yesterday. Being late October a chill had sunk its teeth into the afternoon and Lil and I took our time walking home from school. As we approached our corner, we saw a police car pull up outside the store and before we could reach it, a crowd had gathered. Kids and grownups, some strange, some familiar, appeared from nowhere and Lil and I got pinned in our doorway. Taller kids blocked our view and adult voices floated back over our heads. Even Mr Lucas, the arthritic janitor from St Anthony’s, hobbled up the street to join the excitement, pushing his way to the front where the big boys made silly jokes. When one kid yelled, ‘Won’t be no singing in Sing Sing for Mack,’ Jet the local drunk who’d been banned from Mack’s store cheered. Then one girl asked if the store had been robbed, but the old Polish woman who worked for a man who lived opposite the O’Brien’s claimed that Mack’s wife had been stabbed to death outside her kitchen door.

For some reason a swell of laughter went up from the crowd before she added, ‘Cops been over our way asking questions.’

Every night that Mother had come in from work and counted the days we had till Thanksgiving to find a new home, I had prayed that something bad would happen to Mrs O’Brien. But it scared me to hear that she’d been murdered, because what if my mother had done it? My heart was pounding like a tomtom when the police drove Mack off in handcuffs; as that old janitor shouted, ‘Everybody’s gone loco, including the President!’

It was dusk before Mother’s footsteps plodded up our creaking staircase and before she could turn her key in the door, Lilian opened it. But Mother already knew about Mrs O’Brien and she couldn’t kick her shoes off fast enough to cut a step of Charleston, the weight of her round body causing the windows to rattle. When she kissed Lilian’s crucifix, I felt surer of her guilt, despite her asking us a few times, ‘Do folks think he did it or not?’

My sister christened that day Killer Wednesday and suddenly kids at school were also calling it that. But I personally made no reference to Mack or Mrs O’Brien as I was sure somehow that some nun would spot my guilt. Smell caramels on my breath. But what I imagined that I was guilty of I can’t say.

The Crash couldn’t erase the holy days which followed Hallowe’en, but Mack’s disappearance shrouded them for me, especially after some official boarded up the store windows and pasted a NO TRES-PASSING sign on the door underwritten with small print, big words that even Lilian couldn’t pronounce.

To see grown people sitting on the sidewalk with their heads in their hands or hear women weeping during mass as the days trundled along had me thinking that Mrs O’Brien had many mourners. And when Mrs Carrington, the neighbourhood widow, started wandering up and down our street moaning, ‘God wouldn’t do this,’ it never occurred to me that they were under duress because of the Crash.

Since nobody collected our rent after Mack’s arrest, Mother felt like she was winning, until the bank foreclosed on Mr Herzfeld. She couldn’t believe that her White Hope had been ambushed by Wall Street. Then a few days later, the Herzfelds let Mother go: the evening Mrs Herzfeld announced, ‘We won’t be needing you any more’, my mother’s world collapsed.

Initially, I think she enjoyed waking late and seeing Lil and me off to school. She certainly never burdened us with worries, although she must have been desperate. Yet by some act of faith she produced a cake with a candle for my seventh birthday.

Those November afternoons my sister and I would get in from school to find Mother seated at the window spying on neighbours she knew by sight but not name. She said what made it worth working at the Baptist church for no money was that she met other women who’d lost jobs.

But mother missed the Herzfelds. Probably missed the sight of their cosy fire that she complained about having to clean, and probably missed the luxury of their fancy bathroom and their kitchen which she said had too many gadgets.

Mother pretended that she was glad when Mr Herzfeld collected his Motorola, because Hortense’s things took up so much space, but entertaining ourselves without it was hard.

In spite of these sudden changes, our room looked almost fancy with Miss Hortense’s bed in it, especially after that big pile of newspapers had gone to the rag and bone man.

By Thanksgiving Mother had somehow started slipping to the Herzfelds’ at daybreak to do their laundry and cook for a paltry few leftovers, but thankfully Mr Herzfeld had the grace to stop her visits. He sent her home with two apples, a slice of stale pumpernickel and an egg, wrapped in her blue apron.

The next day I nibbled my apple segment under a December sky as bright as Mother’s apron.

That sliver of apple tasted sublime.

There are fewer glowing moments in my childhood than Lilian liked to record, but I don’t pretend that I was in a perpetual state of gloom. I had a child’s ability to assume that clouds drifted away.

In fact, Mrs O’Brien’s murder may have had a positive effect, because I probably imagined that the baddies sometimes get it in the end.

Christmas that year turned out to be one of my happiest, happier even than the Christmas after my marriage, because the postman had arrived in the snow on 24 December with a two-by-ten-inch parcel. Having never received mail, I couldn’t believe that a package arrived with my name and Lilian’s crudely printed on the brown paper wrapping. To tell the truth that meant more to me than the two wooden flutes we found inside, with the small tag signed, ‘from Saint Nicholas’.