misery. And that's how we spent the rest of our recess periods until the day we were called into the director's office and told that we were being sent home. Our mother was well again.
It wasn't until we were home that Mother told us how the social workers had decided that she was not in good enough health to be a 'fit mother', and that we kids would remain in custody at the orphanage until we were sixteen, old enough to get jobs. Mother had used the formidable weapon of her furious French-'n'-Indian temper to browbeat the astonished social workers into letting us live together again. But next time...
To avoid there being a next time, whenever Mother had to go to the hospital, Anne-Marie and I did everything we could to conceal the fact that we were at home alone, so the social workers wouldn't send us back to the orphanage. I would wash our clothes in the bathtub, and Anne-Marie would try to keep the house clean, awkwardly wielding a broom twice her height. When I did the shopping at Mr Kane's, I would mention that my mother had told me to get this or that, or that she was feeling just fine, thank you... anything to deceive any welfare spies that might be lurking around.
My sister and I came to dread the approach of Christmas. Mother never seemed to realize how frightened we were that our fragile family would be broken up again, and permanently this time, all because of her hard-headed determination to give us 'Christmas presents every bit as nice as those rich kids get, come Helen Highwater!'
For years I thought of Helen Highwater as some sort of avenging she-devil who descended upon people who were trying to get things done. You see, my mother had a flawed ear for idioms and adages, which she often twisted around, like accusing someone or something of being 'dull as dishwater', or her life-long assumption that the 'hoi polloi' were the snobbish upper crust of society. When she said the word she always used to push the tip of her nose up with her finger to illustrate the snootiness of the hoi polloi. I suspect that she was sustained in this error by the similarity between 'hoi polloi' and 'hoity-toity'.
The welfare agency gave us $7.27 a week, and through careful buying, extreme self-denial, and great imagination in the planning of meals, my mother managed to feed and clothe us on what worked out to a little less than thirty-five cents per person per day. The welfare paid our rent directly to our faceless slum landlord instead of giving us the money and letting us find our own accommodations. They paid much more for our three-room apartment than people with money in hand would have been asked, but then as now the Lords of Poverty didn't trust the poor not to squander or drink up their money.
So the welfare system gave us basic shelter and food, but we were on our own when it came to those little extras that made life more than a daily grind of survival: birthday and Christmas presents, or going to the movies once a month, or buying my sister a nice dress 'once in a blue noon' to give a little variety to her wardrobe of ill- fitting hand-me-downs provided by the nuns at Saint Joseph's Convent, or buying a pound of the coffee that was my mother's only hedonistic vice (just two cups a day), or for the special holiday celebrations she used to make for us, like our long-awaited and much-appreciated Easter treat of 'Virginia Baked Ham' that she confected from two cans of Spam, a can of pineapple and a small bottle of maple syrup. Mother used to shape and score the Spam and arrange the rings of pineapple, then bake it so that it looked exactly like a miniature glazed ham, and we used to have yams with margarine and maple syrup, which was cheaper than sugar in those days because Vermont sugarbush owners were suffering badly from the Depression. It was my job to color the margarine, putting the white block of grease into a bowl, then sprinkling the orange coloring powder over it and mixing it in with a fork until it looked like butter... though it still smelled like grease. It would not be until the war came along and absorbed all the produce of America's Dairyland that the powerful butter lobby allowed precolored margarine onto the market.
These little life-enhancing pleasures could not be had on thirty-five cents a day per person, so extra money had to be made either by my mother or by me, shining shoes or running errands. And sometimes we just had to do without. But even when things seemed their grimmest, Mother used to assure my sister and me that one of these days our ship would come in and carry us far, far away from the slums to some Easy Street out West where we'd never again know the helplessness and hopelessness that is the worst part of poverty. When I was little, I envisioned Mother's metaphorical ship pulling in at one of the Hudson River piers, and my mother and sister and I would walk up the gangplank, and never look back. But one night we were sitting at the kitchen table and Mother was dreamily describing the splendid house we would live in one of these days, when I became rich and famous... and with a shock of ice at the pit of my stomach I suddenly realized that
Evening came as I sat on our stoop, thinking about the day we arrived in Albany with our boxes of stuff and our bits of battered furniture standing on the pavement for everyone to see. I got up from the dirty step that left a gritty mottle on the backs of my bare legs and went in. As I passed through our kitchen I dropped the nickel Mrs McGivney had given me into our Dream Bank, which was an empty box of Diamond kitchen matches we hid on the shelf under the real box of matches to baffle any thief who might come snooping around. The Dream Bank was money saved up from Mother's occasional part-time jobs and from my rounds of the bars and taverns downtown on Friday nights, carrying my hand-made shoeshine box on my shoulder and asking men if they wanted a shine (black and brown polish only, no two-tone shoes), which only the occasional drunk or some guy trying to impress a woman ever wanted, although sometimes they'd give me a nickel or even a dime to get rid of me. Like selling apples on the street corner, shining shoes during the Depression was a way of begging without total loss of dignity. The Dream Bank was supposed to be for special things that would bring color into our lives... we bought our second-hand Emerson radio with the cracked Bakelite case from it, paying twenty-five cents a week for over a year... but more often than not, it got emptied out for dull, soon-forgotten things, like food or clothes.
That evening after the last of my radio programs, I tugged myself back to reality and went to sit on the edge of my mother's bed to play two-handed 'honeymoon' pinochle with her, while my sister cut out and colored dresses for her paper dolls. To save the cost of new paper doll books, my mother would buy one then trace the clothes, tabs and all, onto paper she gleaned by cutting open brown paper bags and ironing them flat. In this way, one paper doll book did the service of half a dozen, lasting until the cardboard dolls got too limp from handling to stand up. My sister would spend hours drawing her own designs and coloring them in, then hanging them onto the cardboard dolls in a series of 'fittings', all the while twittering animatedly as she played both the dressmaker and the customer, usually a rich, spoiled, very demanding actress. Anne-Marie loved to create styles from what she saw in the movies or in magazines, but her games were burdened, and to some degree spoiled, by my mother's need to see everything we did in terms of its potential as the ship that was sure to come in and rescue us from Pearl Street. That summer, Mother was sure that Anne-Marie would become a famous costume designer for the movies and bring us all to Hollywood, just as she viewed my bookishness as a sign that I would become a university professor and take us all to live in some nice college town upstate.
...Or maybe a doctor. As my mother was often in and out of charity hospitals, I guess it's natural that her romantic ideal was The Doctor, just as her implacable enemies were The Nurses, particularly the impolite or dismissive ones who were, my mother was sure, jealous of the interest the doctors took in her unique 'lung condition', which never did receive a specific name like bronchitis or emphysema or pleurisy. So one of the ways she proposed for me to lure our Ship of Hope close enough to shore for us to slip on unnoticed, was by becoming a doctor. For one whole winter, I wove and unraveled games in which I was a famous doctor who somehow managed to save the lives of rich patients without having to come into physical contact with them. Even in my games I was too squeamish to deal with people on the level of blood and pus and... other liquids.
I always felt relieved when the honor, and responsibility, of bringing our ship in was bestowed upon Anne- Marie, if not as a famous fashion designer, then as a dancer. Even as a little kid, Anne-Marie loved music and used to sing and dance around to our Emerson. Some neighbor told my mother that she had talent, 'a born professional, believe you me!' and overnight it was decided that she would be the girl chosen to replace Shirley Temple, who, after all, couldn't remain young and cute forever, could she? The next day Mother put Anne-Marie's hair up in bouncy sausage curls like Shirley's (we called her by her first name now that we were all in show business). The sausage curls would help talent scouts from Hollywood to spot her, and the next thing you knew, we'd all be in sunny California, living, as my mother with her tin ear for idiom put it, 'on the flat of the land.'
...As differs from the slippery hillside?
But for this dream to come true, Anne-Marie would need to have tap-dancing lessons, and that was out of the question, because group classes cost $1.50 per session and she would need at least two a week, which would have been more than a third of the $7.27 we received from the welfare people. So the Shirley Temple dream was
