never played …
There was a certain amount of democracy in our house, although hard and fast rules for the children like no cursing were never allowed to be broken. There was an assumption that we had as much right to an opinion and a vote in matters as the women. The word fair was used a lot, perhaps too much. It only confused me into thinking that life was going to be fair.
Television continued to be my teacher. Family sitcoms like Ozzic and Harriet and Father Knows Best not only kept me amused, they made me informed and aware of things that I was not exposed to through my own experience. For instance, women on the television were always crying, but I don’t remember seeing my mother or grandmother cry through my childhood. For any upsets other than physical injuries, we were invariably told to ‘save the tears’. It was almost a relief to fall down and skin a knee, because I could wail the house down without the least reproach.
One of the things that set us apart from other kids in the neighbourhood is that we weren’t beaten. Even though people didn’t yell out of the windows in Mount Airy or curse each other so that it could be heard by passers-by, we often overheard the parental threat of the strap or the belt and the screams and cries that resulted from such punishment, which my mother considered uncivilized and inhumane. We were never punished in this way and were thought lucky by kids who were. Edna would threaten us with the strap if we incensed her while my mother was out, but it fell on deaf ears, even if she stomped off as far as the back yard to pull a switch from the stinkwood tree.
We couldn’t afford holidays, but I didn’t feel that we were missing much, and at that time, family holidays weren’t considered a necessity and planned with the feverish intensity that they are today. We had the odd day trip to Atlantic City or the Catskill Mountains, which broke the monotony. That we’d been somewhere and seen something was enough when school started and we had to write about our vacation. At Christmas we got enough presents to entertain us until a birthday brought some more. Most of the family’s birthdays fell within a week of each other in the spring.
Apart from these minor deviations, we carried on like a lot of other families. We were just noisier. Mornings were absolute chaos. Any kitchen would be busy in the morning with a family of six, but when three of them are women, there’s never enough space and our kitchen wasn’t particularly large. The radio didn’t blare as loudly as my grandmother claimed it did, but Dennis refused to switch it off so that Edna could think, and she refused to stop shouting about it so Ikey could think. There was always that beat in the background, for instance Bo Diddley singing ‘Down Yonder, Down On The Farm’ on the local Melangian station until it got switched to a station with Eddie Fisher or Tony Bennet crooning something above the din of the family rushing up and down the stairs trying to make their way to their separate lives. My mother developed the irritating habit of calling several wrong names before she hit upon the name of the person she really wanted to address. ‘Pamala, I mean Dennis, I mean Marsha.’ She did this so often that my aunt and grandmother caught the habit of it, too.
Fits and fights over whose turn it was in the only bathroom filtered downstairs into the kitchen through a crack in the floorboards to mix with the snitch of swearing that came with a last-minute touch-up with the straightening comb as one of the women singed her scalp in the rush of confusion.
‘Was the cat fed?’ ‘Have you got your milk money?’ ‘Who took my last piece of chewing gum?’ ‘Put your front-door key in your pocket …’ I can’t think how anybody arrived in one piece ready to start the day. Luckily the long journey to school on the trolley had a calming effect.
There was nothing that I thought I needed that I didn’t have except an atomic-bomb shelter stocked with neat little shelves of canned goods and folded army blankets and candles and a flashlight. Lots of people had converted their basements like this in case the Russians bombed us, a threat often implied in the Junior Scholastic and the Weekly Reader which we got at school. Instead, our basement was like an overstuffed attic with that oval portrait of my grandmother always in the way. Things were put down there when they had no other home and part of it was used as a laundry room. It was doubtful that it would ever become a bomb shelter, or even get a facelift of knotty pine walls and be called a den.
This is where my mother was one day, sorting out the coloureds from the whites to do a wash load, when I was called down to speak with her.
Ikey was standing on the platform near the washing machine when I bounded down the staircase. It was one of those old-fashioned washing machines that look a bit like a white pot-bellied stove with a separate wringer attached on top. No one ever went down to the basement unless they were doing the wash, and this made it the only place in the house you could be guaranteed a bit of privacy. It was lit by a bare bulb which hung down from the ceiling and cast spooky shadows.
When Ikey told me that Blair had been killed early that morning in a car accident, she wasn’t crying. She was just piling the clothes into the washing machine. (I’ve detested doing laundry ever since.) Because she didn’t really look up at me, I could tell that it was one of those times when I wasn’t allowed to ask questions. If I blinked fast I could always keep back the tears so I tried that while I stood by the bottom stair waiting to be told what to do.
My father had never written to me. I couldn’t rush upstairs to look at his handwriting.
There was no school that day because of a teachers’ meeting, so Dennis and I went to the little green next to the library. It wasn’t raining. The leaves had fallen.
Later that afternoon I was allowed to go to a friend’s house. She had a Persian cat that had its own birth certificate, which I thought was the most wonderfully chic thing I’d ever heard of. My friend’s mother must have found it very disarming when I looked up at her and said that my father had died that day. I didn’t make a big deal of it, because I didn’t want any sympathy. I just wanted to tell somebody.
No flowers arrived. And Blair wasn’t mentioned again until my mother had to go to Boston for the funeral.
The mornings came and went with nothing to mark the change. This was something else that I was to learn not to talk about. I got so good at keeping secrets that I eventually learned to keep them from myself.
Music rescued me from secrets and silences just around that period. My mother had taken me to see Johnnie Ray once when I was about five. He was performing in a cinema with the curtains drawn across the silver screen so that it could double as a live theatre. He was supported by the Four Aces or the Diamonds – one of those groups with a name like a suit of cards. They came on before the main attraction wearing blue iridescent suits and sang. Three of them gathered around one microphone singing harmonies to the melody and managed at the same time to snap their fingers, smile and do little dance steps in unison. The lead singer had his own microphone and spoke to us between the songs while one of the three in back clowned around a bit as part of the act. The other two just sang and I suppose they did that well enough or the audience wouldn’t have clapped so much.
Ikey had told me before Johnnie Ray appeared that he was deaf, so I felt very sorry for him when he came out with his hearing aid in his ear and sat down at the black baby grand piano. Our seats were in the balcony. It was dark everywhere except on the stage and we could see him perfectly, singing and swaying back and forth on his stool as he played the piano.
His blond hair was swept back and parted. Only one lock in the front moved, however much he threw himself around as he sang ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried’. A few women sitting near us were crying and so was Johnnie. I imagined he was crying because he was deaf, which did seem very sad to me, but I didn’t know what on earth those women were crying about.
The Uptown theatre in Philadelphia was rather famous for showcasing better-known Melangian performers. My mother said it was too dangerous to go there. Fights sometimes broke out in the audience, and on a few occasions gangs had scuffles outside after a show. So I didn’t go to any more concerts, but when people like Eddie Fisher, Dean Martin or Sammy Davis Jr sang on the radio, I imagined them appearing on a darkened stage just like Johnnie Ray.
I had to rely on radio, television and my brother’s collection of records for my music. When we moved to Mount