Before I knew a word of race relations, I knew the images of “colored women” on our small black-and-white TV. I was especially drawn to those “tragic mulatta” stories that struck me as kind of like me. And those dark-haired passing-for-white ladies who suffered the secret of their race in silence didn’t really look too different on the TV screen from my mestiza mom, dressed to the nines and mixing cocktails for the party.
LITTLE RASCALS
The Shoemaker was the first Jew I ever met, before I knew anything of the history or cultures of Jews. I was five years old. The Shoemaker had a thick accent from a very faraway place and his entire shop was wallpapered with red- and black-inked newspaper clippings with markings I later realized were Yiddish. We all liked the old man right away, and his shop smelled like the olden days of shoe polish and tooled leather. He seemed to like us, too, or maybe it was mostly our mom he liked when he told her that we kids were different from the rowdy gringo ones that hung around the tracks near his shop and treated him like a stranger.
The railroad tracks cut diagonally through our neighborhood and served as the shortcut and meeting ground for our motley crew of mixed-blood/mixed-size kids. There, sitting on the tracks in an act of defiance against the distant rumbling of an approaching train, my sister and I would eat our hot-off-the-comal buttered tortillas de harina freshly rolled inside our palms.
“What are you eating?” the white boy asked. “Yeah, it looks like burned paper,” the other goaded.
“They are tortillas,” we answered, appalled by their ignorance.
I never thought about whether the Shoemaker had a wife or children or grandkids. I do know he was a man of passion and it was plastered in bleeding red and bold black on the walls of that small cobbler shop in that not-so-WASP Norman Rockwell town. My dad told me many years later that the establishment of that town “never really approved” of the Shoemaker’s presence there. The newspapers were “Communist,” he confided with a hint of danger … and admiration. I didn’t know exactly how that disapproval was expressed. Perhaps it was no harsher than bits of idle gossip, to which my father, alone, was privy as someone who was read simply as a white Protestant, no hint of the Mexican wife at home.
Not until the occasion of my father’s ninetieth birthday would he reveal to me that the founding documents of the Exchange Club, to which he had belonged as the local train station manager, restricted membership to whites only. My FDR Democrat father claimed he had no knowledge of this until his resignation from the club, which occurred not in protest but because our family moved to the nearby town of San Gabriel. My father admitted: “I remember there had been an issue with the wife of one of the club members. Seems she had a problem with Vera being Mexican.”
“It is often the women,” my dad opined.
We three kids would regularly stop in on the Shoemaker and offer him a few tunes like “Que Será, Será” or “You Are My Sunshine.” Our repertoire was limited, but he’d pass us some pennies for our efforts. Each time, of course, we had to act like we didn’t want or expect the money (good home training), but no sooner had the coins landed in our sweaty summer palms than we’d race across the street to the market to buy some Tootsie Rolls or red braids of rubbery licorice.
James had a beautiful voice, and one of the Shoemaker’s favorites was our rendition of “Tom Dooley,” with our brother in the lead. A Kingston Trio hit recorded in 1958, this song was a kind of corrido in English with origins in the American South about a guy who ends up killing his woman on a mountain and knows he will be hanged for it.
Hang down your head, Tom Doo-oo-leey—
Hang down your head and cry.
Hardly the repertoire for schoolchildren, but we’d sing con puro gusto, adding little movements that prefigured the Temptations. I was given a special “tomboy” segue, linking the verses, belting out my “ah well-ah now boy,” with my index fingers drawn like two six-shooter pistols. We sang often as children, especially with our mom, though her vocal cords had been damaged as a child. It was a freak accident, as she described it. Something about her brother Esteban driving back into camp in the middle of the night, drunk no doubt, and the Model T brake not holding.
Some of my best memories were of us kids singing with our mom. Taking the Pasadena Freeway home from Adams Street, after visiting our grandmother and Uncle Bobby and Auntie Tencha at El Taxco, a small Mexican restaurant they ran in South Los Angeles. Or perhaps we splurged and took the short drive down on the same freeway that dropped you right smack onto Broadway and into the heart of Chinatown. In the central plaza, a real organ grinder played tunes as a small fidgety monkey with a silly cap, just like in The Little Rascals, snatched a penny from our outstretched fingers. I remember giggling nervously at the animal touch of the spindly fingers. At the Wishing Well, we fed coins to the Buddhist-style shrine with a waterfall running down its face. Standing on our tiptoes, we tossed pennies toward the little bronze bowls marked “Prosperity,” “Fortune,” “Peace,” “Love,” or a custom-designed “Your Wish.”
Suddenly sleepy from the MSG in the Chinese Dinner #2, we’d make our way home, speeding through the three cement tunnels carved through the rocky canyon of Chavez Ravine. As we approached each tunnel, one after the other, we’d let out our breath with an extended “Aaaaaaaaah” to see whose could last the longest.
Then it was our usual Shoemaker repertoire of songs to get us the rest of the way home, my dad sometimes chiming in from the driver’s seat, his voice enthusiastic, but utterly off-key. We’d hold our ears—“No, Daddy, please don’t”—laughing. And gradually, we’d hear my mother’s voice start to go hoarse and this was the cue for we three kids to kick in with our closing number.
“Put your arms around me, honey, hold me tight.”
Our mom had taught us kids all the hand gestures, hugging our bodies as we “huddled up and cuddled up with all [our] might.” Rolling our eyes at each other with the line “eyes that I just idolize.” Our bodies “rockin’ like a motorboat” to the beat of our love-struck hearts. All this leading up to the grand finale, where we sang full throttle—
“Oooooh, babe, I never knew such a ga-a-a-a-al … li-i-i-i-ke…”
Pointing to our mom, all three in unison. “You-ou-ou-ou!”
She always acted surprised, like she was the last person she expected us to point to!
* * *
I got my wish every time.
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO NORMAN ROCKWELL?
Bleach-blond high-heeled Hallie Huff, my father’s mother, was in her fifties when in 1940 she gave up her San Francisco stage actress career on a gamble. Urged by her sister, she moved south to manage, and in time was able to buy, a second-class second-story hotel in the oil-derrick-dotted town of Huntington Beach, California. Soon World War II broke out, followed by Korea, and the Kenwood Hotel would bring in a sea of soldiers and a flow of cash.
Grandma Hallie’s two-bedroom manager’s apartment was “exotic” long before I could make sense of the word. The living room, which looked over Main Street and the half-block walk to the fishing pier, was furnished in all manner of rattan, with fixtures painted in a thick lacquered black and deep Chinese red. Even the kitchen stove, which we would inherit upon her passing in 1958, was a bright red.
The memories I retain of our regular visits to see our grandma at the Kenwood Hotel are mostly of the long trip getting there. It was one of the few places we traveled to beyond that tight L.A. hub of freeway interchanges. In the mid-1950s the Santa Ana freeway stopped short of completion and spilled out onto Beach Boulevard, which ran through miles upon miles of orange groves when Orange County truly was orange.
But the closest I came to knowing Grandma Hallie was in the last year of her life, when she lived with us for a short time under my mother’s care after suffering a massive stroke. I remember my mother bathing the flaccid pale body of her mother-in-law in the tub. I remember the same sagging body on the toilet and my sister and I sitting sentinel at the old woman�
�s feet. Waiting for our mother to wipe and fetch her, we three passed the time deciphering the stories hidden inside the design patterns on the linoleum floor. I liked that. I remember Hallie sitting at our small kitchen table for her morning coffee. I watched riveted, the cup rattling in its saucer as she raised it trembling and steered it into the open slit of her mouth.
With the death of Hallie Huff, our life as a family would take a dramatic turn. The Kenwood Hotel was passed on to Hallie’s two children: our father and his sister, Barbara. For a brief stint Barbara, a divorcée with four children, managed the place. It seemed she failed at the post (I learned in whispers behind closed rattan doors) by sleeping with too many of the tenants. That’s when our hero-mother, with a third-grade education and the wisdom of survival, would take the helm.
By the time we made the move in 1960, the hotel’s heyday was long over, catering exclusively to wayward suicidal lovers, homosexual loners, thieving lesbians, and chain-smoking alcoholics. Well, that’s how I understood it, as an eight-year-old, watching the dramas unfold all around me, my belly pressed against the smoke-saturated hallway carpet, as I expertly shot rubber bands at a lineup of green plastic WWII soldiers. My brother slaughtered me and I slaughtered Memo, a year younger, from apartment 14. I loved Memo, brushing my cheek up against the soft carpet of his crew cut whenever we played house.
During our time in Huntington Beach, my dad stayed on in South Pasadena to keep his job at the station. As both hotel manager and maid, Vera supported herself and her kids, fought off the advances of the single male tenants (of which there were many), and never asked her husband for a dime. Joseph would dutifully show up to spend one night a week with the family, sometimes punctuated by an evening out at the Paddock, a 1940s family cocktail-seafood restaurant, just across the street from the hotel.
I don’t remember missing my dad. Sometimes in his absence, my sister and I would sleep with our mother, the “No/Vacancy” light flashing on and off and spilling its neon red or green over the bedspread. The sheer curtains would flutter with the summer’s ocean breeze as the waning sounds of midnight partying faded in the distance.
On occasion, during those summer months, our dad would accompany us kids over to the beach. Stripping down to his swim trunks, he’d make a mad dash for the water, diving headlong into the formidable waves. He enjoyed swimming (something I never saw my mother do), but once out of the water, he was quick to dry himself off, and JoAnn and I would cover the full length of him with a beach towel, adding T-shirts and smaller towels for his extremities, burying his feet in the sand to shield them from the midday sun.
Most of the time, we three kids spent the whole day on the beach by ourselves, our skin easily darkening under the sun; we girls collecting soda bottles from teenaged beachgoers for the nickel and two-cent deposits they yielded. At the end of the day, dragging our booty-filled burlap sacks along the sand, we’d cash in their bottles for our own of Coca-Cola and Nesbitt’s Orange soda pop.
On the best of beach days, a sandbar might unexpectedly emerge from the belly of the ocean, just past the breaking waves and dangerously near the barnacled legs of the Huntington Beach Pier. On such occasions, my big brother would lift me up on his eleven-year-old shoulders and carry me across to it, me holding all our towels up over my head to keep them dry, as our sister swam fearlessly alongside us.
“You can touch now,” my brother would say, and I’d leap off his shoulders to feel the freshly swept wet sand beneath my feet. Spreading out our towels, the three of us would lie down on our bellies, sunning ourselves on a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean. It was our imagined paradise.
* * *
Paradise is lost on the morning our mom comes into our bedroom, sits on the edge of the bed, and announces that she is going into the hospital. “For a rest,” she says. JoAnn is speechless. I cry. “No more than a week,” she promises. But we both detect the lie.
That night, on the eve of her departure, fearing her doctor’s suspicion that the growing pain in her stomach is cancer, Elvira goes to her altar and lights a votive candle before the portrait of San Antonio de Padua, clad in his Franciscan friar’s garb, El Santo Niño in his arms. She promises to wear the robe and rope of her santo if he would only entreat God on her behalf. If only she might live just long enough to see her young children grown, just long enough for them to be raised by a mother who loves them like no one else will.
Querido San Antonio
Yo, con toda confianza, te invoco …
* * *
It was marvelous to behold, my mother told me of her first encounter with San Antonio. In 1940, upon her return from Tijuana, she had gone to see la curandera on the east side of town. She entered la sala, where an altar in San Antonio’s honor filled the room. It was ablaze in candlelight, and the whole room was “so full of God” that Elvira literally dropped to her knees. “The lady could see things,” she said. “She could tell your future.” What she saw, my mother never said, but from that moment onward, Elvira never ceased in her devotion to the saint. To San Antonio we, as a Mexican family, prayed each day as we walked out the door, blessed by my mother’s thumb and forefinger shaping a cross upon our foreheads. To San Antonio my mother offered up all that was inconsolable inside her.
* * *
During my mother’s hospital stay, my mother’s youngest sister, Eva, took us girls into her home with her family of six. Soon one week turned into another and another, until JoAnn and I were eventually enrolled in a nearby Montebello school. As I entered the third-grade classroom, the teacher handed me my very own personal box of school supplies. I liked the box, but feared it put my mother’s return even further away. Back at my auntie’s house, I secretly stole comfort in the sound of her voice from the kitchen, regañando a sus hijos. How I envied my cousins’ scoldings, the familiar inflections in Spanish; the smells of home, ajo con comino; the cadence of a Mexican mother pounding out tortillas; the timbre of my tía’s throaty laughter, so like my mom’s.
Our brother had been sent to stay with Grama Dolores on Adams Street in L.A., a monolingual Spanish-speaking world, where our cousin David, a year younger than James, served as daily interpreter. We missed our brother. Something changed for James during that time (that’s what his sisters think); when barely twelve years old, he could neither visit his could-be-dying mother nor did his father come to relieve him of his worry. He would return to his family more apart from us. More on his own.
Vera described her husband coming to visit her in the hospital. Was it daily? “But he might as well not’ve come at all,” she’d tell me in the years ahead, before I was old enough to truly taste bitterness. “He’d just stand there in the room como un pendejo. He didn’t have a damn thing to say to me!”
What do you want your husband to tell you when you are tied up in a knot of IVs and your three children have been distributed like chores among the relatives? What does a man say to his wife when she might very well die from whatever history is eating away at her gut? But my thirty-eight-year-old father had nothing to show or tell her of their children—no small anecdote, no hand-drawn get-well card—because he scarcely, if ever, saw them.
My father came of age in a kind of Mad Men world, minus the suits and the secretaries. He was a white man indistinguishable from the rest, whose only requirements were to bring home a paycheck and never lay a violent hand on his wife.
Only once did our father hit us. It is midafternoon when he enters the kitchen to the directive: “Go hit the kids.” I don’t know what we had done wrong—talked back, fought with each other, the usual stuff. Not once do I remember my mother saying, “Wait until your father gets home”; for she absolutely knew it was she we feared. But clearly this time Vera had had it! He comes into our bedroom, utterly awkward in his performance as disciplinarian. We stand in lineup, ready for the belt, but instead he begins to awkwardly slug at us with his fist, not knowing where or how to hit us. I remember being knocked on the head. His punches were heavy, but inte
ntionally not hard enough to hurt. We all three held back our nervous laughter, so as not to embarrass him. It felt so strange because there was no anger in it. No anger meant no passion. And passion was what our mother had us kids understand as love.
* * *
“Mama’s gonna die,” JoAnn whispers. She couldn’t keep the worry to herself. That morning she had overheard a phone call my auntie had received from the hospital. We had suspected it all along, never believed my mom when she said she was just going in for a rest. She had looked too, too sad. And scared.
Days before, our auntie had taken us out to buy new school clothes, dresses we could never afford at home. And, although every weekend their family went out to eat at nice restaurants, JoAnn and I felt that each new dress, each dinner out betrayed our mother, lying broke and broken in her hospital bed, a mere half-hour drive away.
At night, I would lie next to my sister on the pile of sleeping bags and blankets on the front room floor, praying for our mother’s life. All night long, I scratched and scratched and scratched. My nails became pickaxes, digging away at the quarry of blood and pus and crusted flesh inside the fold of my arm. Missing her was unbearable.
In the daytime, death was postponed. My elbows snapped into switchblades as I wrapped a tomboy’s grip onto a baseball bat, just like James had taught me. Where was my brother? My bat meets the ball as it flies over Tío Manuel’s garage in the hope of my mother’s return. Cousin Manuelito pulls off his baseball cap in amazement: a girl who can really hit a ball!
Native Country of the Heart Page 3
