ONE
I took nothing with me when I left. No photographs, no books, no souvenirs of childhood. Dressed by my stepmother in hand-me-downs, and oversized dresses from a thrift store, clothes that I vowed never to wear again, I arrived in Philadelphia in the summer of 1963 without a suitcase. My father and stepmother had been so eager to be rid of me, the potentially incendiary leader of a harmless gang of disconsolate children, that I was sent to my maternal grandmother, Mae Shields, the day after I graduated from Punahou, where I had been at school since I was a small child. I was seventeen years old.
My grandmother lived with her unmarried daughter, my Aunt Mary, in a working-class neighborhood in North Philadelphia called Germantown, inhabited by first- and second-generation Polish, German, and Irish families, in the same small battered house where, as a young widow, she had raised her five children. In the front room, sitting on a rusty radiator, was a chipped plaster statue, two feet high, of the Infant of Prague, for whom she had made a billowing red faille cape with a high, stiff collar, stuffing the interior of his gold-plated crown with the same material, and two brocade gowns, a white one for Holy Days and a cream-colored one for days less sanctified, each with lace collar and cuffs.
In addition, there was a console with a television and a radio, my grandmother’s chair, a few rickety tables with yellowing crocheted runners, and a sofa. The wall telephone was in the kitchen, which always smelled faintly of gas. I was given a small bedroom on the second floor, overlooking a neglected yard. We shared a bathroom that smelled of cigarettes and starch, as my aunt used the tub to wash her nurse’s uniform. A large rusty fan was wedged into my grandmother’s bedroom window to cool the house in summer.
My grandmother and her younger sister had immigrated to Philadelphia in 1910, when Mae was nineteen years old. She considered her undeserving self to have been especially favored by the Virgin, whom she thanked every day of her life, as she had soon found work as a housemaid and seamstress for a rich family in Chestnut Hill. My grandfather, Dennis Shields, was chauffeur to the same family, and in the photograph that my grandmother kept next to her chair for fifty years, he wears a peaked cap, a high-necked gray wool tunic, jodhpurs, and polished black boots. He died during the Depression, perhaps from the effects of gas suffered in the First World War, in which he served as an ambulance driver in the Army of the United States, earning a citation for conspicuous bravery under fire.
My mother, whose name was Anne, liked to say that Mae had been a lady’s maid, a position that demanded more refinement than was customarily found in a house servant. She was eight years old when her father died, and claimed that after his death, she and her younger brother and sisters were each given only an orange on Christmas morning. When she was eighteen, thanks to the intercession of the Infant of Prague, she received a navy gabardine suit and a gray tulle evening gown, hand-me-downs from Mae’s Chestnut Hill employer, which allowed her for the first time to imagine that she might one day create herself anew.
Clothes, which provided the means both to conceal and to display herself, became objects of fetishistic importance to my mother. It was, after all, the well-made suits and evening dresses, tailored to fit her, as well as my grandmother’s insistence that her daughters learn Main Line manners and customs, that had, with some sleight of hand, transformed my mother from a shanty Irish girl into a beautifully dressed and well-behaved debutante. This is not to suggest that my grandmother and my mother had a calculated and well-thought-out plot to facilitate my mother’s escape from Germantown, but rather that they knew, at least my grandmother knew, to make the most of what they had been given.
My mother, Anne Shields, in nursing school, Philadelphia, 1941
My father, an intern in medical school, had grown so enamored of the lovely student nurse who was to become my mother that when he at last learned that she was not a girl from the Main Line, it was too late. By the time I was a child, she had become the woman she wished to be, and was no longer playing a part, only now and then hiding behind an unfortunate and even unnecessary lie, as when I heard her gaily tell a neighbor that she had attended Bryn Mawr, causing the woman to ask in delighted kinship, “Oh, my dear, did we know one another? Who are your people?”
My father, Richard Dixon Moore, Philadelphia, 1944
My mother was ashamed of her impoverished Irish Catholic childhood, and the story of the Christmas orange and other childhood sorrows were told to me in a whisper. As she was given to exaggeration, I did not always believe her, suspecting, too, that I was not always meant to believe her. As a bride, she had been treated badly by my father’s family, the descendants of Quaker farmers and wheelwrights and millers, acquisitive and narrow-minded, who had come to America in 1620 and later in 1682 with William Penn, settling west of Philadelphia in Chester County. Over time, they had lost their thousands of acres at Chadds Ford and Newtown Square, as well as their austere religious practices. They had as dissenters so proudly answered only to themselves that they had lost the gift of tolerance, considering themselves superior to those whose suffering appeared less sublime in origin; fleeing tyranny, they did not hesitate to practice it themselves. In the eighteenth century, some of my ancestors had been expelled from Quaker meeting houses for marrying Protestants and, even more damning, the occasional Irish indentured servant. One of them, a blacksmith, was disowned for shoeing a war horse. It had been as impossible for my mother, given her experience of poverty and humiliation, to feel kinship with my father’s family as it had been for them to embrace a girl who, being Irish and Catholic, was assumed to be dishonest, dirty, and ignorant. My mother, at least in the beginning, was occasionally dishonest, but she was never dirty.
My aunt Mary Shields covered in leis. She came to look after us when our mother died. My sister Tina is missing from the photograph, Honolulu, 1958
* * *
WHEN I WAS twelve years old, my mother, then thirty-five years old, died in her sleep. My Aunt Mary immediately took leave of her job as head nurse in the emergency room of Pennsylvania Hospital and made the long trip to Honolulu.
My aunt was tall and slender. Her black hair, already turning gray, was kept in a neat bob that reached her chin. As she was from that mysterious place called the mainland, she wore short white kid gloves to Mass on Sunday. She used a dusting powder from Elizabeth Arden called “Blue Grass.” There was a prancing horse on the lid of its round box, and its scent mingled with the strong smell of her Chesterfield cigarettes. My mother had been spirited and funny, even mischievous, and I was surprised to discover that despite my aunt’s appreciation of wit, she was a bit prudish. She would turn away when I changed my clothes in her presence, which was fine with me, but not a gesture to which I was accustomed. I noticed, too, that she was a wary and fretful driver, refusing to make a left-hand turn in an intersection, a habit that added fifteen minutes to any drive, and which lasted for all of the years that I knew her.
There was immediate tension between my aunt and my father, evident in her expression when he appeared to take things too lightly, and in his refusal to acknowledge her disapproval. Her role as caretaker to her dead sister’s children was not clearly defined and must have at times caused her to feel like a servant, a role that held a certain shame, given her mother’s former employment. My aunt’s displeasure increased when my father soon began to behave as if he were a bachelor, content to leave his five children, the youngest only two years old, in her dutiful care. He went out to dinner most nights and sometimes returned late, which naturally offended my aunt, who, like me, must have been listening for him. His name was Richard Dixon Moore, a radiologist, forty years old, good-looking and charming, with the distinction and social position then conferred on doctors in small cities and towns. I knew that my father was fond of women, and his recent bereavement did not appear to have lessened his interest. That he had many children at home seemed not to bother anyone but Mary. A neighbor once hinted that my aunt was jealous, but my aunt was so unlike my father, who was pleasure-loving and weak, that even as a child I understood that something as seemingly simple as friendship between them was impossible. It is also likely she blamed him for my mother’s death.
He would sometimes take me to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on a Sunday night. I would order decorously, a little shyly, even when he encouraged me to try things unknown to me like chicken Kiev or peach melba. His own eating fascinated me. It seemed to me very old-fashioned, habits perhaps inherited from his Quaker ancestors—radishes with butter, cheddar cheese on apple pie, salt on cantaloupe.
In anticipation of these evenings, I found a tube of Tangee lipstick at Woolworth, soft orange wax in a flimsy metal tube, which I wore for a dinner concert given by the Kingston Trio at the Royal Hawaiian. It had a very cheap, sweet smell and I don’t know how my elegant father tolerated it, but he never said a word, certainly not the compliment I hoped I would receive. I wore one of my full-skirted, tight-waisted Lanz dresses, with a stiff crinoline that scratched pleasantly against my legs. My father’s attention, which had been amiable but distracted before my mother’s death, could not have come at a more precarious moment in my life, but I did not know that. There I was in my lovely dress, happy in my prettiness and eager to please my father, yet all the while thinking in a vague, flitting way, Be careful, don’t like this too much. You are here because your mother is dead.
After one of our Sunday night suppers at the Royal Hawaiian, my father gave me my mother’s pearls, and an amethyst ring, large and rectangular, set in gold, known, rather glamorously I thought, as a cocktail ring, with the admonition that I was not to wear it or the necklace until I was older. I once wore the pearls to bed, but I was so afraid that the strands would break that I couldn’t sleep, and I never did it again. I was able to wear the ring on my middle finger if I wrapped a Band-Aid around the back of it, but only in my room and at night, my hand heavy with the weight of it. The necklace and the ring were my only souvenirs of my mother, other than a shoebox of photographs that I had taken from my father’s desk and kept hidden under my bed. One day, however, as I left the house, I pushed the ring onto my finger, and then my hand into a pocket of my shorts so that no one would see it. I walked the mile to the bus stop at Lunalilo Home Road where Mr. Silva, the bus driver, stopped for me. We traveled past Kuli‘ou‘ou and Niu Valley and ‘Aina Haina before Mr. Silva handed me my paper transfer and I boarded the bus waiting at the roundabout at Star of the Sea church for the rest of the trip, through Kahala, past Diamond Head and Kapi‘olani Park into Waikiki. The ride was a pleasant one, the bus plump and jolly like a bus in a cartoon, with open windows and leather seats. My hand was no longer in my pocket, but rested, somewhat awkwardly, wherever I thought someone might notice it, and admire it.
I left the bus at Kalakaua Avenue and crossed the street to the Outrigger Canoe Club for my weekly surfing lesson with the beach boy, Rabbit Kekai. I changed into my new white sharkskin two-piece bathing suit and went to meet Rabbit. As I was afraid that I would lose the ring in the water, I asked the man on duty at Beach Services if I could leave it with him. He handed me one of the small brown envelopes people used to hold their keys and money and wrist watches when they were on the beach, and I put the ring inside the envelope and sealed it and wrote my name on it.
Rabbit was waiting for me in the water, holding his long wood board with one hand to keep it from floating away. I lay at the front of the board on my stomach, my legs spread, my toes trailing in the water. Rabbit pushed off and slid onto the board behind me, his head just above my bottom, the customary position for students and their teachers. We paddled to the breaking surf, which was rarely very big at Waikiki, and he caught a wave easily, getting to his feet and then lifting me under my arms so that I stood in front of him on the board, seldom falling, until we came to the end of the little wave, when we would again assume our positions and paddle to the break.
After my lesson, I went to Beach Services to collect my envelope. The beach boy looked in the drawers of the desk, and ran his hand across the cubbies in the shelf behind him, where there were a few envelopes, but nothing with my name on it. He shook his head and asked some of the other beach boys if they had seen it, but none of them could remember such an envelope. I looked for Rabbit, but he was no longer on the beach. I asked the man to look once again, and he made a quick search among the furled umbrellas and a pile of used beach towels, lest it had been dropped there, but there was nothing.
I walked to the locker room and vomited into a waste bin. This is the end, I thought to myself. I considered for a moment running away from home. I pulled on my shorts and T-shirt and walked barefoot to the bus stop in front of the club, my wet bathing suit dampening my clothes. Not only had I disobeyed my father, I had lost my mother’s ring. I could not tell him, and I could not tell my aunt, who disapproved of my father’s gift to me. As I handed the bus driver my ticket, I said, “I lost my mother’s ring,” but he did not answer me, only nodded and closed the door behind me with a whoosh.
That night and for many nights, I slept with the pearls in their black velvet bag clutched in my hand. I no longer went to the Outrigger. I prayed that my father would forget about the ring and that my shame would remain a secret. Then one afternoon, he asked to see the ring. He thought it could be made smaller with a ring guard. For a moment, I stopped breathing. He asked if something was wrong, and I covered my face with my hands. When he asked again, I told him that I had lost the ring. I had not yet allowed myself to believe that the beach boys, men whom I not only trusted but admired, had stolen it. My father was very angry. To my relief, he did not ask how I had lost it. I hadn’t lied, and yet I hadn’t told the truth, either. “I will never give you another piece of jewelry,” he said. And he never did.
Although I had begun to notice a certain sourness in my aunt’s treatment of me, I attributed it to her occasional moodiness. But one day, unable to restrain herself after my father took me to dinner at Lau Yee Chai, a fashionable Chinese restaurant in Waikiki, she told me that it was a mortal sin for a father to date his own twelve-year-old daughter. I was shocked, and the following Sunday, I told him that I had too much homework to go to dinner with him. He was disappointed not to have my company, he said, but if he was aware that he had committed a mortal sin, he did not show it.
A photograph from the Star-Bulletin newspaper, with Koko Head visible through the window, Honolulu, 1959
My father soon married a woman of means from Stockton, California. Her name was Catherine Lloyd, but she was called Pat. Her late husband, who had grown up in Hawai‘i, had left her several parcels of valuable land, one of them in Waikiki. We children had not met her before their marriage, which was in San Francisco, and were introduced to her a few days later when we learned the news from our aunt. Pat was thirty-one years old, handsome in a masculine way, with short hair, protruding eyes, and a yellow complexion. My aunt spent a few minutes with her before she excused herself and went to pack her suitcase.
Soon after Mary left Honolulu, our new stepmother, who had a four-year-old adopted daughter, did not hesitate to let us know that she despised us.
* * *
I FELL ILL a few days after I arrived at my grandmother’s house in Germantown, and spent a week in Pennsylvania Hospital with pneumonia brought on, my grandmother believed, perhaps rightly, by shock and neglect, and which served to confirm her fear that my brothers and sisters were dying, too. Because of my aunt’s connection with the hospital, I was treated very well. There was a television mounted high on the wall of my private room, and it was there that I first discovered Johnny Carson, the likes of whom I had not known existed. Our stepmother had not allowed us to watch television except on weekends, and never late at night, and Johnny Carson came as an intensely pleasurable, even erotic surprise. The days were very long in the hospital and I counted the hours until it was time for Johnny. I would watch the entire show, distracted by erotic longing, delaying the moment when I would turn out the light to sleep, when my head would be filled with thoughts of my brothers and sisters. I would lie awake, filled with worry, fearful for their well-being and even safety. I missed the forest at Tantalus and I missed the ocean. I missed my mother.
My aunt told me that she had read in the newspaper that my father and stepmother were in Philadelphia for a conference, as my father was the American Medical Association delegate from Hawai‘i. She found him at their hotel and telephoned to tell him that I was sick, but he did not come to see me. She was very upset by this, but I was so accustomed to his negligence and my stepmother’s cruelty that I was embarrassed for him, and for a moment almost defended him.
My grandmother and aunt had little money to spare, and I knew that I would have to find a job, an idea that was appealing to me, as it signified independence and even maturity. The thought that I might make things hard for them was distressing. My father had not given me any money when I left Hawai‘i, and had not since troubled himself to send money to my grandmother. Two years later, my brother Rick wrote to tell me that he and our fifteen-year-old sister, Tina, had run away and had been taken in by a kindly neighborhood spinster named Frieda Brown, who lived with her aged mother in a house on the beach a half mile from our house at Portlock. They, too, were without sustenance, other than that provided by the loving Frieda, who fed them Le Sueur peas and creamed chicken on toast and got them to school each morning, and even found them a little pocket money.
When I came home from the hospital, my grandmother took me on the Germantown Avenue trolley to Rowell’s department store, where she used some of her monthly pension to buy me a Jonathan Logan dress, a wool plaid kilt with a big kilt pin, two white blouses, some sensible underwear, including a girdle that extended from my waist to my knees, two Barbizon nightgowns, a pair of navy blue Capezio flats, and a navy tweed Peck & Peck coat, which suggested she believed I would at least live with her through the winter.
My aunt felt obliged to listen each Saturday afternoon to the broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and together we struggled through a melancholy few hours of Carmen or Tosca, the living room full of cigarette smoke, rendering it impossible for me ever again to listen to opera on a Saturday. She cooked dinner for the three of us each night when she came home from work, exhausted and a little irritable. I would offer to help, but she preferred to do it herself. After a day of giving orders, often under great stress, she did not want to bother with me. As she was both efficient and good at simplifying things, she had established a menu that never varied. The first night we would have a small roast that I had picked up earlier from Mr. Miklosi, the butcher at the end of the street, a package of frozen French-cut string beans, and a baked potato with large amounts of butter, salt and pepper, and sour cream. The second night we would have what was left of the cold roast beef, string beans, and a potato. The third night, when the meat was finished, we had scrambled eggs and canned tomatoes. It was all delicious, especially as my brothers and sisters and I had barely survived on the scant portions of lukewarm powdered milk, powdered mashed potatoes, and SpaghettiOs allowed us by our stepmother. I especially loved what I came to think of as Egg Night. Occasionally, there would be a special treat of Sara Lee cheesecake. My aunt kept a raw peeled onion at the side of her plate, from which she now and then took a bite, as if she were eating an apple. All of this was very comforting to me.
I loved my grandmother with a passion. I loved my Aunt Mary, too, but she was less forgiving than my grandmother, and I was sometimes afraid of her, especially when she accused me of imagined sexual escapades. It did not help that her somewhat hysterical accusations reminded me of those deliriously happy evenings after my mother’s death when my father had taken me to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel for supper.
My grandmother, whose people came from Clare, used language from her Irish past, words that thrilled me with their reminder of my mother. She, too, had heard these strange words and expressions. A balsa wood basket of berries was a “punnet.” When my grandmother was angry, she was “vexed.” I understood that she was about to speak ill of someone, often with cause, when she began a sentence, “May God forgive me.” When in a bad temper, she was “in the briar.” She and my aunt both called a woman’s private parts “the Black Gethern,” and when I asked my grandmother what it meant in Gaelic, she said she didn’t know; Black Gethern had always been its name. When I was too brazen for her liking, as when I said that I would never use the term “Black Gethern” as a name for my vagina, she threatened to sell me to the tinkers.
The year before, I had met a young man from Princeton named Singy who was spending Christmas at the Halekulani Hotel in Waikiki with his grandparents, and we had written to each other when he returned to the mainland. He lived on the Main Line, not far from Philadelphia, and as it was summer and he was not in school, he often came to see me at my grandmother’s house. He took me to dinner, or to the movies downtown, where we were once shown to our seats by an elderly usher wearing a red uniform and cap whom I recognized was my Uncle Paddy. To Singy’s credit, he spoke to my uncle without condescension or embarrassment and I regretted for a moment that I didn’t love Singy as much as he cared for me. In September, before he returned to Princeton, he invited me to a Philadelphia tradition called the Bachelor’s Ball. My grandmother knew about the ball and was thrilled that I had been asked, seeing it as the opening move in my conquest of Main Line society, forgetting for a moment that I did not have an evening dress or suitable shoes or what my grandmother called an evening wrap or the long white kid gloves she thought necessary for any well-dressed young woman. Although she had not sewn in years, her arthritic fingers no longer deft, she decided that she would make me a dress for the ball. We spent several days going through the fashion magazines that she kept under her bed, marking pages until we at last settled on a floor-length sheath of white crêpe with little cap sleeves, and pockets and neck bordered in silver paillettes. She sent me to the butcher, who gave me a long sheet of brown paper. I was dispatched to Rowell’s, where a friend of hers in the millinery department repaid an old favor by giving me a bag of ribbons, feathers, and paillettes. We took the bus downtown to a discount-fabric outlet, where she bought three yards of crêpe, and three yards of heavy white silk faille, with which she intended to make me an evening coat.
My grandmother stretched the butcher paper on the floor and cut patterns of the dress and coat with pinking shears. I separated the hundreds of milky, opalescent paillettes from the entangled strips of ribbon, feeling as if I had been given the first of a series of tasks that, if completed in time, would free me from an enchantment. My grandmother worked quickly, and after two fittings, the dress was finished. I had never seen anything so lovely—the dress of a princess, or a fairy. The evening coat was of her own design, reaching to the floor, with a rolled collar ending in a pussycat bow. White silk high heels were bought, and a pair of gloves were borrowed from the daughter of her old Chestnut Hill employer.
I was both excited and apprehensive, perhaps because of my grandmother’s increasingly profligate expectations. I would not know the people there, other than Singy. Despite my childhood dancing lessons, I could not waltz, which worried my grandmother. The dress was ravishing, which may have been why I felt shy in it. Such a disguise had worked for my mother, and my grandmother had no reason to think it would not work again. How was she to know that everything had changed? Girls no longer wore brassieres. I’m not sure that I even knew.
My long brown hair was wound tightly into a chignon at the back of my head. The glistening dress was pressed at the last minute between flannel, the soles of my new shoes gently scored so that I would not slip on the dance floor; the gloves rinsed in soapy water with a drop of glycerin to give them a slight sheen. As I came down the narrow staircase the night of the ball, I noticed that Singy glanced quickly at my grandmother, who stood next to him at the bottom of the stairs. She saw his look, but I could tell that she took it for admiration. I was not so sure.
When I walked into the crowded, noisy ballroom, holding Singy by the arm, I saw that a terrible mistake had been made. Animated young women, tousled and tanned blondes in strapless, short, colorful flowered dresses were already dancing. They did not wear gloves or stockings. Many of them had kicked off their shoes. There certainly were no white faille evening coats.
Copyright © 2020 by Susanna Moore
