I was found on the kitchen floor … I can pull the oddest details out of the hat but am hazy about the crucial facts.
It’s possible that what I remember as a perfumed downpour in ’29 was just another Jersey drizzle. Maybe I’m trying to make something monumental of a bad luck day.
A small bell attached to Mack’s door jingled when it opened or closed. Tinkled like a Christmas bell. It was the only nice thing in the store apart from the silver cash register which Mrs O’Brien bragged was antique. As the bell jangled above my head, I was greeted by the smell of his open jar of striped candy canes wafting from the counter, mingling with the scent of rotting bananas.
I couldn’t have felt more anxious had I gone in there to steal. My heart was throbbing. Nose started running. Legs felt shaky … I was like somebody experiencing a heavy dose of stage fright.
Mack’s tap was dripping in the back room and rain was spitting on his display window. Somebody had drawn an ‘eight’ in the dust on an empty bottom shelf and my own fingers nervously rubbed the rough cover of my yellow copybook.
Mack was seated behind his marble counter. With an elbow resting on the till, he was grumbling loudly to himself about shank.
Of course he was crazy, but I didn’t know it. Back then I thought storekeepers were mini-gods, along with priests and policemen.
Mother thought Mack was good with kids, because he would tease Lilian about her braids sticking out or he’d jibe Willie Ruttles about the racket Willie’s scooter made on the cobblestones. But when I walked in out of the rain that day, Mack didn’t acknowledge me.
I stood in the doorway staring at him, recalling how Father Connolly had said that when Mack’s father-in-law, Tommy Sullivan, had had the store, there was no cleaner grocery in Camden. Father and Tommy had been schoolboys together in some Irish fishing village and had moved to the States around the same time. Father would say in his sing-songy way, ‘Tommy was a fair landlord and the finest grocer to come out of County Mayo. Even before I took over his parish, he gave more than a tenth of his income to the Sisters of St Anthony’s.’
I stood with my mouth open, thinking of how to ask Mack to show me how to whistle, but what came out was, ‘What’s a shank, Mr Mack?’
Peering at me from behind the cash register with his hairy hands planted either side of the counter, he rose to answer my question. His glasses magnified his sunken eyes. ‘A shank, Irene? That same word stumped me on my first day apprenticed to a butcher on Rathbone Street. I was just a kid.’
It always pleased me that he knew my name.
As he spoke I inched further into the store which not only smelled of rotting bananas, but of the pickle barrel and those peppermints.
The stench in Mack’s was a constant source of speculation between my mother and Miss Hortense, because Mack didn’t sell bananas any more than he sold fresh meat. Miss Hortense was sure that the rotten banana smell was Tommy Sullivan, trying to materialize after Mrs O’Brien left the store door ajar to admit her father’s spirit on All Souls’ Day. Mother thought it was a rat decaying under the counter.
With the blind half drawn, it was hard to see the dust on the shelves of canned goods. It also made it harder to spot the cobwebs which hung like cheesecloth above the door that led to the storeroom.
The only thing he wiped was the counter which he swabbed occasionally with a grimy rag. Otherwise, he expected the stock and shelves to mind themselves.
The old feather duster, which never left its hook by the double doors, had belonged to his father-in-law. Like the broom propped in the alcove against a jumble of wooden clothes pegs, tapered candles, tins of rat poison, boxes of nails and Dutch Boy cleanser. Leftovers from the days when Mrs O’Brien’s father had sold hardware as well as food.
The sawdust on the floor, caked with dirt and dust, made Miss Hortense sneeze. So, often when she had needed something, I was sent with her shopping list scribbled on a torn piece of brown paper bag. Those regular trips down our dim, narrow staircase and out the door which was ten steps from Mack’s gave me the same odd feeling that I had in his store that afternoon as the rain fell.
When Mack explained what a shank was, it must have been mid or late September. Hardly a matter of weeks between my request for a whistling lesson and the end of Mrs O’Brien’s life; between hope for the future and the Depression.
He pointed to my exposed shin saying, ‘That’s your shank and if you come closer, you can feel mine.’
Mack drew up his pants leg. His ghostly skin looked so white to me. And hairy. I couldn’t have been more interested had he offered to let me stroke a live mink. I touched the orange fuzzy hairs with my index finger and allowed him to run his thumb along mine while he quizzed me about school.
I said, ‘I’m the youngest girl in Sister Elizabeth’s class.’
Mack teased, ‘Does that make you ten?’
‘I’m six … seven on 11 November. On Armistice Day.’
He pulled up my socks. ‘11 November?’ he said. ‘So that’s how come there’s a parade downtown! It’s your birthday!’
I didn’t expect to be lifted up, but I liked seeing the store at that height. Up with the cans of potted meat that I had seen him take down for Miss Hortense whenever I’d come as errand girl. His thick fingers curled around my thighs, but I was embarrassed to ask him to put me down. He hugged me so close that my instinct told me to wriggle free.
So close that the only air left to breathe was heavy with his smelly breath … When he finally put me down, some sweat from his forehead was on my leg but I didn’t dare wipe it and just clung to my copybook.
He patted me on the behind and said, ‘When Ruthie gets home, tell her Mack said everything’s okay.’
He’d been smart to treat me to a caramel. Unlike a mint, it left no scent of our encounter on my breath.
That September of ’29 turned out to be the last time Mother paid him rent. I recall standing with her in his store and she was holding my hand. Mack’s voice was high pitched and he had a habit of starting a sentence without finishing it, but whenever he spoke to her, she’d get so anxious, she’d finish them for him. I remember him saying ‘Your Irene …’ and leaving my name to dangle in the stinky air.
Mother clutched my hand tighter and pulled me nearer and her normally lazy speech was punctuated by a note of alarm. ‘She ain’t but six! She’s my baby!’ Then she fell silent, head bowed like an obedient child. And while I looked from her to him I felt something was wrong but I knew better than to ask what.
While Mack was telling her that he loved to sit me on his lap and recall his days in Patterson as a butcher’s apprentice, Mother’s palm grew sweaty. ‘She don’t fidget,’ he’d said, ‘and asks intelligent questions.’
Of course I used to sit still while his dinky grew hard under the weight of my behind.
Was it in ignorance that Mother imagined that I would have no aversion to Mack’s breath or the way that he would sit me too squarely on his lap? Not on one knee but drawn back against his blubbery belly so that all I could think about was his belt buckle pressing against my spine.
That afternoon, Mack closed the shop after his wife had emptied the cash register and drove home, leaving him to pull the blind down before slamming the door on the dust, the food, the odours and those caramels which were flat and round with a vein of white sugar running through them.
Were we playing out our part in the great scheme of things? Maybe, like Charlie used to say, we’re all just dominoes … maybe Mack had to do what he did to twist me towards becoming what I became.
Anyway, sitting out here tonight I’d be lying if I claimed that I ever lost sleep over him.