Like Venus Fading. Marsha Hunt

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      Hortense.

      Mack.

      In my child’s world, they were family. And I was as hungry for the caramels he would slip me as he was for the sordid pleasures he took for them.

      That first time he touched me must have been some weeks before the stock market crashed. At the end of summer. When the nights still twinkled from the fluorescent lightning bugs that Lil and I used to catch, and the mornings brought a few hours of dry relief to those last, long, humid days.

      Trying to keep up with Lilian, wanting to learn to whistle because she could, is what I partly think led me to his store that afternoon.

      For as long as I can remember, I struggled to keep up with Lilian. That’s how I got old before my time. Desperate to do everything that she could. At six I was struggling to be eight and a half like her.

      All that summer, Mother had been talking about us being the angels in St Anthony’s big Christmas pageant. It was months away, but she was always looking for ways to impress Mrs Herzfeld, whose four girls all did well at school. But it was Miss Hortense who came up with the cockamamie idea that we should learn to whistle ‘Silent Night’ instead of singing it. Mother got as excited as a kid about that. So by the time the fall term began, whistling at the Christmas pageant was all that I could think about.

      And there was autumn, that foolhardy autumn, rushing into a head-on crash with the Depression.

      The elm beside the church was shedding leaves by late September and Mother was dressing us each morning in the high socks handed down by Mrs Herzfeld. But they were too big to stay up on my bony legs.

      Socks. Were they part of the reason I ended up alone that rainy afternoon in Mack’s?

      Lilian was off school that day with what Mother feared was mumps, and I walked home from school amongst a gang of the other kids.

      Although my socks kept slipping down into my shoes, I was scared to bend over and pull them up, in case one of the boys teased me about my legs. So when I felt a drop of rain on my forehead, my socks were clumped around my ankles. As it suddenly pelted down the other children ran, but my socks slowed my pace.

      It felt good to be in the rain as I dawdled home. I remember taking a deep breath and pretending that I was exhaling cigarette smoke.

      I felt grown. Bold. Out there on my own … Six years old …

      When I passed a robin on a water hydrant who seemed to be whistling at me, I tried whistling back, puffed out my cheeks and blew, but all that came forth was my breath.

      I’d often heard Mack whistle through the broken floorboards in Miss Hortense’s room, so, sticking my copybook under the sweater of my uniform, I headed straight for his store like somebody with a mission.

      Mother was at work, my sister was in bed, and with my socks around my ankles, what immediately came to mind was Mother’s daily ‘Don’t you girls go talking to strangers.’ But Mack O‘Brien was no stranger. He was the man she gave the rent to. The landlord who could make her bottom lip tremble over a dime.

      Did I decide to ask him for a whistling lesson to satisfy my mother’s pitiful ambition to brag to Mrs Herzfeld that we had been chosen for the Catholic Christmas pageant?

      Did I head for that store to tempt that man, or did evil coax me to slip there alone? I was quiet and shy, maybe even a little mousey and normally took pride in following rules and doing exactly as I was told. But to blame myself is easier than blaming Mother. Yet I have a vague recollection that she’d told me to stop by Mack’s after school.

      I recall what I did but never remember exactly why. Just like that night before 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.