that afternoon she read that note from Bessie Lovell to our mother: ‘I give classes for a dime per session and can offer Irene a place.’
Refolding it along the creases, Lil said, ‘I’ll get in trouble for reading this, so we have to act surprised when Mother tells us what it says.’
Although I denied it until I had more than she did, I guess as kids I was as jealous of Lilian as she became of me. I’m ashamed to say it, but hair and skin colour mattered so much to me that I envied her braids being an inch longer than mine and her skin being a couple of shades fairer. It’s strange, because I was jealous and yet proud of her at the same time. She always seemed to get the best of everything, whether it was the socks handed down to us by Mrs Herzfeld or the compliments Mother received about us when we did our church recitals. But tap had been different.
Although Mother got the note, she just looked at it and tucked it in her bra with, ‘Y’all go out and play.’
Every day I waited for the glory of hearing that I had been singled out for tap lessons, but the glory never came, because Mother never mentioned it. After two more sessions with Miss Taylor, dancing was to end for me for a couple years.
Is it that Mother couldn’t afford the dime or decided that if both Lil and I couldn’t receive tap lessons from Bessie Lovell, neither of us would have them?
I wish I had the answer.
What I know is that I blamed Lil. First I shunned her and by the time I was ready to make up, she wouldn’t play with me. If we walked down the street together, I would lag behind so that I didn’t have to speak to her or vice versa. In time I couldn’t remember what our feud was about, but we were enemies.
Overnight, she stopped playing big sister, never taking my side when she normally would with Mother or other children in the street. A chasm grew between us which became too great to bridge.
She would mention Camden and I would tease her for it. I would talk about Miss Taylor, and Lil would laugh about Louise’s slightly bowed legs.
Tap dancing had started a family feud.
During the past two days, when I least expect it, faces that I hardly recognize float through my mind. A disturbing number have appeared. People who were of no consequence. Some I can’t identify. Yesterday, while I was having my lunch, for no reason I recalled the face of the Mexican kid who manned the cash register at the late-night drugstore on Hollywood Boulevard where I used to get my tranquillizers. That was thirty-odd years ago and he was irrelevant even back then, but his image came to me so sharply, I wonder if it means something.
Then last night, while I was trying to read my book, in comes the face of that old woman who used to clean the toilets at St Anthony’s. I don’t think I ever said two words to her when I was at school there, so why, nearly seventy years later, should her face come to me out of the blue? Crystal clear, it was.
I’ve heard that this sort of thing happens to people before they go.
Dammit, I hope I’m not dying.
Who’d look after the dog …
This morning, when I took her for her walk, I was watching her do her business and in came the face of that Japanese butler who gave Mother her first full-time job after we got to Los Angeles. I couldn’t decide whether I was glad to be reminded of him or not, because there were times, back before the war, when I used to wonder if, in the short time she’d known him, he hadn’t had a worse affect on Mother than Mamie.
Having met him only once when I was eight, it’s eerie that I could envision him so precisely. I actually saw the fine black hairs which he had missed shaving on his Adam’s apple. Had they been there when I’d met him in 1931?
He appeared in my mind as a complete figure, not just a face. Bowing from the waist he was and smiling, without showing his teeth. His white jacket had a high collar and looked very stiff, somehow formal, although the cut was sort of sporty. He could have been a waiter in a Chinese restaurant …
I think his full name was Ben Toguri but Toguri was all Mother called him. His boss was a German architect Dieter Meyerdorf, who was renting that house east of Hollywood for a year. It was beyond Griffith Park which was still a wilderness back then though a stone’s throw from down town. The district that became Los Feliz, where people built big fancy houses with acres of land around them.
Mother had landed that job on the rebound, because arriving without a uniform to help serve at Meyerdorf’s New Year’s Eve party, the catering boss relegated her to dishwashing. She said even in the kitchen she looked out of place in her brown chemise, so it was her miracle that she was singled out for a full time job.
What really happened is that the other catering staff, refined in their fancy black uniforms, snubbed her. She got on with her work and Toguri noticed her because of it.
The guests at that party left after dawn and Mother stayed on her feet until noon, mopping up booze and scraping off food which had been mashed into the carpets. Having never seen caviar or profiteroles, lobster or mango, she couldn’t put a name to half what she was scooping up.
In the large Spanish courtyard with its huge stone fireplace Meyerdorf had had a five-piece ragtime band entertain his dazzling guests. When the band broke for intervals two Mexican guitarists serenaded the couples dancing beside the swimming pool.
Mother said the noise and bustle had made her head swim. The catering staff snickered in the kitchen about the tuxedoed guests who stubbed their cigars out on the hardwood floors or flicked their cigarette butts into the floodlit fountain. Not that Meyerdorf had noticed, because early in the evening before the throngs had arrived, he’d slipped in a puddle of champagne and had had to be put to bed, where he was followed by a stream of girls who made appearances naked on his bedroom balcony which overlooked the courtyard.
Toguri ran the house but kept his gloved hands clean, noticing that Mother never took hers out of the dishwasher. When the party finally ended, he sent her to clean the tier of terraces either side of the elaborate landscaped garden. When he offered work for the following day, she didn’t say that Meyerdorf’s place was a three-mile walk from our room, because she was afraid that would stop him from hiring her.
Mother had never even seen pictures of a house like that. Put together with more money than sense, it was pure Hollywood.
Of course she mistook the brass for gold and couldn’t understand how anybody lived with so many modern paintings. ‘Look like somebody just threw the paint at them,’ she said and proper antiques puzzled her. She thought everything, including the Italian marble, was to be scrubbed with Dutch Boy cleanser and thought Toguri was crazy for making her take a ladder around the house to polish the towering palms with milk. He laughed when she offered to repair the tapestry that hung in the hallway and tried to explain that being so old it was meant to look frayed.
Toguri must have had his hands full training her to clean the place and she brought home new terms at a fast rate. Ming vase. Persian rug. Victorian lace. Japanese silk. Egyptian cotton.
Every time she left for work I imagined her walking to a fairytale palace. Sometimes she’d describe how she’d perspire, polishing the dining-room table. It seated twenty-four and had a crystal chandelier hanging above it, which she was told never to touch. Every chance she got to shine Meyerdorf’s two-foot-high solid silver crucifix, she prayed while she rubbed that God would protect her from breaking anything in that house.
She loved doing Meyerdorf’s dressing room because she said, ‘That was the safest place to work. I could drop a sock or a pair of suspenders without worrying.’
That Los Feliz job got her humming again. It was as if the richness of her surroundings gave her new confidence. She wasn’t