Читать книгу Criminal of Poverty - Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia - Страница 13

Life was never easy for my mother and me. My father left us when I was four, but he really left before I was born, venturing out into the night to consume large amounts of unknown substances, preparing for his future role as a disillusioned, wealthy psychiatrist. When he finally abandoned us for good he used his birthright of money and social standing to intimidate my mother, and after a bitter, debilitating divorce she was left with no alimony, minimal child support, and almost no personal resources to pull together a life for the two of us.

But my mother’s story of struggle didn’t begin there. It began with the systematic torture of a mixed-race orphan girl in a series of foster homes, a childhood so horrific that she suffered from severe post-traumatic stress syndrome to the end of her life. She was an illegitimate love child, the product of my Irish grandmother’s liaison with an Afro Puerto Rican high-stakes gambler. My grandmother, an impoverished teenage immigrant from Liverpool, was too poor and too ashamed to care for her illegitimate daughter and she gave her up to foster care. My mother’s poverty, my mother’s mother’s poverty and my poverty, an unending chain of isolated poor women with no resources, no family, no support, and no luck.

My grandmother, Helen Josephine, was one of eleven children born to an extremely poor family who lived in the Irish ghetto of Liverpool, England. Her story was told to me many times by my mother, who had gotten it in bits and pieces during the few times she reunited with her mother as an adult. These bits of stories were coupled with my mother’s scant memories from the days in Philadelphia when my grandmother would visit her at the orphanage.

But the largest source of Helen Jo’s story came from my mother’s half sisters, whom my mother didn’t even know existed until her fourteenth birthday. It seems Helen Jo had already abandoned three children in desperation before ending up in Philadelphia and getting pregnant with my mother, and this first group of children—two girls, Jan and Margie, and one boy, Earl—saved up their money as young adults and hired a private detective to find their mother. When they did find her, and found out about my mother as well, they assumed my mother had been the cause for their abandonment, and so their relationship with my mother was always problematic. But they all shared an intense love of story and scandal, and in those times that they did manage to connect there were many hours of gossip and conspiratorial recanting of the “horrible story of Helen Jo.”

Something happened when Helen Josephine Elizabeth McMurphy was thirteen years old. It has never been clear in the vague stories that were passed down—maybe it was a rape, maybe just the violence of poverty. Whatever the cause, the custom in those days was that poor Irish Catholic girls who were pregnant, or considered at-risk of pregnancy, like Helen Josephine who was quite well endowed and considered a provocation, were sent away by their families to a convent. There they would learn to do manual labor and gain the basic skills to perhaps find work as a domestic who could earn and add to the family’s income.

But Helen Jo’s family’s plan was oddly foiled, since the nuns were captivated by the tiny girl with the hourglass figure, with her black hair and wide eyes the color of fresh coal, and they took her under their wing and painstakingly taught her the “King’s English,” working with her for hours on her elocution and the proper pronunciation of consonants. It’s not clear what, exactly, the nuns had in mind for Helen Josephine, though my grandmother maintained throughout her life that she was being groomed to become a Shakespearean actress. It’s not clear either why suddenly, after two years at the convent, the nuns summoned her one day and told her to pack her bag and get ready to “go out on her own.”

“Come here dear,” Sister Maria caressed young Helen’s soft face, “You must fulfill God’s destiny for you to become someone very special. Just be careful and work hard and you can become anything you want.”

“But I don’t think I’m ready, Sister,” Helen Jo whispered.

“Well, we can’t keep you here any longer, my dear,” and with those fateful words they handed Helen Jo a small purse filled with a tiny bit of money and her birth certificate.

The day my grandmother left the convent she had only the one pair of lace-up boots she had on her feet and the dark stiff woolen coat she wore on her back.

“Goodbye dear,” Sister Maria walked her to the massive front door of the convent, opened it slowly, and gave Helen Jo a little shove of encouragement. The large door swung closed behind her with a deep harrumph.

Somehow, she managed to make the voyage to New York, traveling across the Atlantic “to be on the stage,” as she would say to my mother and which my mother would repeat to me with a sardonic smile playing at the corners of her mouth. The contents of the nuns’ coin purse had barely covered her steerage ticket, and then within two days of her arrival in Manhattan she met up with a man whom she would marry within the course of a few short weeks, her “plans” changed forever by that desperate decision.

“Ya stupid mick, have you burned my dinner again?” her husband’s fury rumbled down the dark narrow hall, reaching out to her like the sharp claws of a deadly animal. Since losing all his money in the crash of ’29, he had forbidden the use of any electricity in the house. After dark the only light in the house was the soft glimmer emanating from a lone streetlight outside the kitchen window.

She gazed at the line of cooking pots hanging above the stove, their bright copper bottoms gleaming in the darkness. When they were newly married, on her fifteenth birthday with her husband nearing his forty-fifth, her mother-in law had brought the set of pots and pans to the house, proclaiming loudly, “I hope you’ll be able to use them dear, I know you aren’t used to such nice things. I know your family barely had indoor plumbing.”

“Ya goddamn stupid mick, how hard is it to make dinner?” his voice dragged her tired mind back to the moment,“If your head wasn’t on your shoulders, you’d lose it.”

The sound of his steps shook the floor. His feet, like his body, were wide. His head and face were long, topped off by a solid brush of dark red hair.

“Get out of here you idiot!” his huge hand came crashing down, throwing her to the side of the room,“You can’t do anything right. Why did I get stuck with an ignorant mick like you for a wife?”

She tasted the warm redness in her mouth; her hands shook as she reached for the pan, her thin fingers trembling. He was coming at her again.

“Do ya think I’m going to stand for this? I can send you back to that hole you came from, with all the rest of your lowlife relations!”

She held on tight—it would have to be now, if he came any closer.

“Aah, what the hell. I’m too tired to deal with the likes of you tonight,” he turned and lumbered out, the floor resuming its foreboding quake.

Her head began to throb. She clutched the thick handle and began to stand up carefully, moving very slowly. She needed two hands for the heavy pan as she walked across the hardwood floors that she’d spent endless hours polishing to a high shine yesterday.“You stupid bitch, you think this is clean?” and then a clenched fist crashed into her face and then another and another. Hours later she had awakened, slumped over in a pool of her own blood in the darkened hallway

She stepped slowly out of her slippers, feeling the floor with her toes. The pan felt solid in her hands—it would be tonight, it had to be tonight, now, while things were quiet. She sank to the floor, swallowing screams, Please someone help me—good God what am I to do?

“You’re a stupid mi– just like your mothe–” he was drunk by now and his insults grew in volume, dropping consonants from every other word like dry leaves. Soon he would get up to deliver a beating, as he did every night.

She felt the metal fly from her hand. And then there was no sound, the voices left her. He was quiet. Just a faint whisper from the gramophone, “It had to be you … wonderful you …I wandered around and finally found somebody who …”

No one was ever sure why, but when Helen Jo ran out into that cold New York night, fleeing what she thought was a murder scene with no money, no support system and no immigration papers, she headed for Philadelphia. In fact, she hadn’t killed her husband, though an admixture of alcohol and a hard conk on the head with an iron frying pan did render him unconscious until far into the next day. The three children woke up to find their father slumped over in his favorite chair the next morning, and discovered that their mother was gone.

My mother told me this story several times, always with a mix of sorrow and admiration. Sorrow for the collective sadness of the children left behind in that house and admiration for Helen Jo’s final and resolute act of desperate rebellion. And then the story would pick up again with my grandmother’s arrival in Philadelphia and her fateful meeting with the man who would become my mother’s father.

“Miss, you must be cold. Would you like to wear my coat?”

“Oh no, that’s all right. I’m fine.”

“What’s a pretty little lady like you doing out alone at night?”

He was tall and thin, with kinky black-brown hair, dark skin and eyes like smooth pieces of brown suede, and even on the cramped, freezing Philadelphia-bound bus he seemed to swagger as he looked deep into Helen Josephine’s eyes. He had started talking to her as soon as she ran breathlessly onto the bus wearing a thin winter coat and carrying no luggage, the strands of her long black hair like small birds taking flight. His voice was smooth, like butter in a warm pan, melting into her ears and soothing her fear.

“Where are you headed, little lady?” he began.

This question caused a tremor in her heart—she had nowhere to go and no one she could tell. Her husband had never allowed her to have any friends or money; she’d never had a job in the United States and he had never signed the papers to finalize her citizenship. She had absolutely no idea where she was headed; she only knew that she was running.

“You know, I’m a professional singer and I’m on my way to the top—I’d love to take a beautiful little lady like yourself along with me,” his voice came back to her and she listened, let it calm her. She let him go on talking all the way to Philadelphia, barely responding but slowly letting herself become convinced.

“Well sweetie, this is my stop. Why don’t you come with me and I’ll set you up in a nice little room out of this cold?”

She nodded and followed him off the bus and down the dark street. He walked fast, grasping her hand tightly and pulling her along with him, “Forget your troubles c’mon get happy,” a honey-glazed tenor rolled from his mouth, spreading slowly across the bitter night sky. He sang as he walked, each step crunching down into the thick snow. My tiny 18-year-old grandmother walked numbly by his side, her small boots leaving child-size footprints.

She lived with the honey-voiced man for several months in a dark corner room of an old hotel in downtown Philadelphia. She awoke each day alternately overwhelmed by his sweeping charm and terrified at being there at all. He would leave each morning with a soft kiss to her forehead, and after he left she would circle the room in a thick haze wondering where she was and how she could leave. Sometimes she would walk outside and get lost in all the people, loud cars and towering brick buildings. The only thing that calmed her were her moments with Saint Patrick and Jesus as she sat with the small ceramic statues at the tiny altar she’d built in secret behind the dresser. Each day as she walked the streets she would pick up some little thing—a flower, a piece of shiny glass—to place at the tender feet of her minute Saint Patrick statue and the even smaller likeness of Jesus on the cross which had come from her mother’s house. As she did this she would pray for forgiveness—there were so many things she had done wrong, so many things she must do to absolve her sins, and it terrified her to think of them.

Sometimes he would be gone overnight, sometimes only for a few hours. When he came home he would sail into the room bringing flowers and candy and promises of million-dollar singing contracts.

Eventually she began to feel a life growing inside of her. She said nothing, and as she became bigger and weaker she stopped eating. She needed to punish herself—she needed to suffer for her sins. One day as she knelt asking Saint Patrick for forgiveness she collapsed.

She woke up in a hospital several days later—he was leaning over her, “Honey, baby why didn’t you tell me? That’s so beautiful, we have a little child. You know I’ll do the right thing. Let’s get married. We’ll have a big wedding, my family will love you. Everything will be fine.” He held her close and she felt him breathe in and out and, for a second, she lost herself in his dream.

Then she shook her head quietly from side to side.“No,” she said. She could not marry him, or anyone else for that matter.

“But honey, what do you mean?” a rush of words flowed from his mouth. She watched his lips move and his eyes plead, and she nodded her head absently until he finally stopped.

Two days later they returned silently to their small room with a tiny infant girl. She put the baby in a small wooden bassinet and then lay down on her bed without saying a word. He changed his shirt and within minutes he was gone. She shuddered as the door shut behind him. With his departure the baby began to cry

Hours turned into days, but she refused to move. The baby cried and cried, but she never got up to give it any care. He came home to find the infant almost blue. “Oh my God, she’s almost dead! Honey, what’s wrong?”

But Helen Josephine gave no reply—only staring ahead blankly. He picked up the baby and rushed it to the hospital.

A week later he returned with the infant and a very small old man barely taller than Helen Josephine. “Let me see my little daughter-in-law,” the old man proclaimed loudly in a voice thick with other worlds.

The tiny old man limped into the room. He was wearing a full-length camel hair coat that trailed on the ground. His shoes were old and scuffed and his hat was too big for his head. He walked over to Helen Josephine, his eyes two shining black puddles peering out from under folds of dark brown skin. “Pobrecita, let me see if I can help,” he murmured.

After that the old man came over every day with a bag of groceries. He warmed the milk and prepared the bottles, he rocked the baby to sleep, bathed her and changed her diapers. He cooked meals for the young mother and told her stories about his struggle to come to the U.S. from Puerto Rico as a poor immigrant; he complained about his “ingrate sons.” Once in a while he would stop to ask a question—usually about her family, sometimes something simple like if she was hungry—but she never responded, continuing to stare straight ahead or act as though she was sleeping. His son rarely stayed there anymore, and eventually he just stopped coming by at all.

After almost a year had passed, Helen Josephine got up from her bed one morning very early, looked around the room as if she was seeing it for the first time, got dressed and walked out the door. As the door shut the baby began to cry, letting out a scream that woke the entire building. The landlady of the building came in to see what was wrong. She found the little baby alone and carried it downstairs with her.

Two full days later Helen Josephine returned to the room with a new hat and some news. “I got a job,” she told the old man as he stood at the sink washing the baby. “I got a job, so now everything will be okay.”

“Really, well that’s a relief,” the old man chuckled, “We thought you were dead.”

From that day on Helen Josephine awoke before the sun was up, got ready for work, took the baby—whom she had decided to name Mary Jo—downstairs to the landlady who had agreed to watch her in the mornings for a few cents a week, and went to work.

The old man would come every day at 1:00 to pick up the child and take care of her until 6:00 when Helen Josephine would return. As she settled in he would boil a pot of loose tea for both of them and stare carefully into his teacup in preparation for a “reading” by Helen Josephine.

“You know Helen, you’re really good at this. I know a lot of people who would like to know their future. It might be worth a few bucks!”

Eventually more people started to come into their little room “to hear their fortunes” told by Helen Josephine. On any given night there would be up to ten people crouched together around a small table wedged tightly into the middle of the room. The attendees were mostly older men, sons of immigrants all, born in red-lined Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican and Jewish ghettos—not too far from their indigenous roots to still believe in magic, but far enough to worry about the future of the stock market in the rapidly dying capitalism of the Depression. Several of them would blur the lines between psychic and mistress, looking lasciviously at the attractive single mother who held two full-time domestic jobs and still barely had enough money to buy groceries. This group included Maxi Rosenburg, who also had a penchant for little girls and would come by at 4:30 each day, sending the old man home so he could molest little Mary Jo under the guise of “helping out with child care.”

One day the old man fell ill, and when Helen Josephine came home the baby wasn’t in the room, only a befuddled and partially dressed Maxi Rosenburg alone under the covers.

“Where’s my baby, and why are you half dressed?” she screamed.

“I don’t know sweetheart … I don’t know anything anymore,” Maxi answered blankly.

“Where’s my baby?” Helen banged on the landlady’s door.

“The old man never came to pick her up. I had to miss work because of you. I can’t take care of this child, Helen. You’re going to have to put her in a home if you can’t find someone to watch her. But it’s not going to be me, I have enough to do. You should’ve thought of that before you spread your legs for every Tom, Dick and Harry you meet.”

There was no one who could watch the small girl, and after two days missed at both jobs Helen Jo was going to be fired. Within a few days, one-and-a-half-year-old Mary Jo was shipped off to her first foster home.