Like Venus Fading. Marsha Hunt

that nobody else could have deciphered, ‘Irene, you put your mouth in all my business! Mamie’s right! I need to take a switch to you and Lilian more often … See kids in Sippy with rags on their back and hands raw from picking cotton. I can’t be messin’ with you, this here’s the Depression!’

      This was the reply I had got for asking, ‘How will you find a church when we get to California?’

      I hated getting told off more than I hated cod liver oil or going to bed while it was light. Mother’s scolding made me feel small and humiliated, whereas I liked to think that I mattered, that I was important in the scheme of things.

      Anyway, when Mother unpinned her hat and threw it on a bed in that dormitory, after a good deal of moping and sighing, she produced an envelope with three names on it. When she said that the minister she met didn’t think there was a Catholic church in the vicinity, I sensed that my sister was awake.

      Lilian turned her face to the wall and gave no indication that she heard Mother say, ‘That minister say his niece gives tap dancing to little girls on Sat’days. Her name’s Louise Taylor … He thinks she don’t charge but a nickel a lesson.’

      My sister pretended to be asleep and Mother knew as well as I did that she was having one of her moods.

       11

      That summer we moved to Los Angeles, Lilian made sure that Mother never forgot that she wanted to go back to Camden. Like a pitbull, my sister could grip the past between clenched teeth. She daydreamed about the nuns and Camden’s changing seasons; the conkers in spring and the june bugs of summer. She even harped on about the scrapple Mother used to buy. Just about everything we’d left behind was deemed irreplaceable.

      Admittedly, she was ten that summer of ’30 and had more of a past to cling to than I did, but for some reason she seemed to have pasted all her hopes on a Camden life. Like a toddler clinging to a worn-out teddy. And further to provoke me, she pretended that every shadow was Miss Hortense with the police, coming to drag Mother to prison.

      So Lilian didn’t want to adjust and nabbed every chance to question or whine, throwing the thorny head of Christ and the Virgin Mary into every conversation. Even when Mother mentioned tap again.

      ‘We can’t afford tap and school uniforms,’ Lilian said.

      But me? Irene Matthews? I had delusions and had an image of myself writing Miss Hortense a letter to inform her that I was in Hollywood studying tap. I was the same little girl who only ten months earlier had slept on a pile of newspapers, and despite Mother being KO’d every round by poverty and fear, I sensed there was hope in dancing and some victory in the fact that she was even thinking about it. I’d seen the famous Bill Robinson tapping in a film short and watched some big boys on Buchanan Street try to imitate his moves, and the thought of tap excited me more than church recitals. So when my sister told Mother, ‘I don’t want to dance,’ they were both startled when I suddenly laid into Lil, pounding her with both fists.

      The nuns had made me think that anger was wicked and Mother had passed her impoverished notion on to me that tempers were the luxury of the rich, so I don’t know where my sudden eruption had come from, but I was seething. ‘You do wanna tap, Lili, and don’t ever say you don’t!’

      My mother was more taken off guard than my sister and although I got slapped by them both, I was glad that I’d made my point.

      What followed two days later is what I sometimes imagine is the day my career began.

      We had been in Los Angeles for under a week and when the heat in that dormitory became intolerable, Mother took us for walks. One blistering afternoon she pointed to a shopfront on the opposite side of the street. ‘I betcha that’s where Reverend Walters from my new church say his niece works.’

      The costume store was unlike the familiar brick buildings in Camden and different from the little wood-framed shotgun houses that I’d seen in Mississippi. It had smooth adobe walls and a roof of red clay tiles and was sandwiched between identical buildings on either side.

      Sun baked the sidewalk and burned the back of my neck as I stood with my hand in Mother’s, afraid that she wouldn’t suggest that we cross the street where only a few old Model Ts were rattling up and down.

      Together we ambled over to peek into the small display window. Pressing my nose against the glass, I strained on tiptoe to see the masks, feather head-dresses, pink toe shoes with satin ties and stiff white tutus.

      I must have been salivating like an old sheep dog when we entered the small shop. It smelled like a second-hand clothes store, packed as it was with slightly musty old costumes for rent.

      As I prayed that my sister wouldn’t mention uniforms or ask Mother any impertinent questions, my heart started to play leapfrog. I felt like a rich kid in a toystore, because my Mother assumed a self-important air, when she told the elderly male assistant that she wanted to see two pairs of tap shoes. I didn’t dare smile, because there was something sobering about the moment. Mother didn’t look nervous and didn’t seem embarrassed to ask for assistance which she normally was in stores, and I guess Lil sensed that something radical was happening, because even she kept her mouth shut.

      The shoes that I was given to try on were black with round toes. I can’t recall if I sat to try them on or stood up while somebody helped me slip my foot into them, all I know is that when I walked across the costume store in them anybody would have thought that I’d tried on some wings. My whole body responded to those shoes and it was like I was a mummer in the Thanksgiving parade. I seemed to lean back and strut. The ease of the leather and the comfort – I was like a grown woman appreciating the caress of French glove leather …

      When I went bankrupt thirty-five years later and one of my creditors accused me of having a shoe fetish, I told the judge about my experience with Mother in 1930, during the Depression, when I was fitted for the first time with shoes, the cheapest tap shoes, which hadn’t been shaped first by Mabel Herzfeld’s feet. Or by my sister’s.

      Pretty shoes always helped me look other people in the eye.

      As Lil and I left that store with our new shoes in a bag, my face must have ached from smiling. Those shoes were a rebirth.

      When the whole country was littered with the jobless and homeless, Mother, a baby-faced coloured girl from the backwoods with two kids to feed and no prospects, must have sensed that she had accomplished something momentous.

      Even my sister became putty in Mother’s hands and did all she could to be helpful.

      That’s how we ended up in that crowded public school near Reverend Walters’s church.

      One night in ’63 when it suddenly hit me that Mother was the reason I could dance but couldn’t spell, I tried to stab her.

      Those were the days when mothers were getting blamed for everybody’s neuroses, but that wasn’t the only reason that I suddenly saw her as Satan. She thought I had gone crazy.

      One of the most humiliating things about my supposed suicide wasn’t just the photo of me naked, ten pounds overweight, it was the suicide note that I’d supposedly written, which made me sound like a pea brain. Somebody had mastered my handwriting, which I’d hidden from fans after my husband had made fun of it: ‘Irene writes worse than my granny, who never finished fourth grade.’

      Neither did I really.

      Sure I made it back and forth to school for a day here and a day there, but I was always behind and grew shrewd at hiding that I knew less than the other kids, whereas Lilian … her extra years with the nuns stood her in good stead for life.

      I told Charlie that only she would have gone to all that trouble with my suicide note but he couldn’t figure out her motive.

      In Hollywood