Her Hungry Heart
Authors: Roberta Latow
Her Hungry Heart
Roberta Latow
Copyright © 1993 by Roberta Latow
For my friend Bibi, a Polish countess who claimed her father’s dream, and her husband Rodney Harris
‘On hearing about great love, respond, be moved like an aesthete. Only, fortunate as you have been, remember how much your imagination created for you.’
C. P. Cavafy
He was not handsome, more a colossus of a man, with his six-foot-plus height and massively broad shoulders and chest, his dark hair, thickly East European accent, formidable hooked nose, and kind brown eyes. He humped hundred-pound sacks of potatoes, crates of lettuce, boxes of apples, baskets of peaches and plums as if they were weightless. He was among the last of the traditional Yankee pedlars, even if not a Yankee himself, nor even born in his adopted country, the United States. He drove an imposing, bottle green Mac lorry, with its powerful motor and hunky Goodyear tyres.
Cassandra was not happy having to work for a remote and gruff if not unkind father. But this was 1942. There was a war on, no young men at home to take on the summer job. Worst among the things she detested about working on the lorry was having to peddle with him into the Blocks in Chicopee. The Blocks were filth and poverty, a foreign land.
The area was the size of two football pitches, with not a blade of grass, a single tree. The hard-packed earth had not a hint of life in it. On it perched row upon row of weathered houses, little better than double-decker shacks with steep wooden outside staircases. They formed lines of depressing, sinister, barracks-like accommodation running the length of that barren place, with ample room between buildings for the pedlar’s lorry to park and serve its inhabitants.
Here hardly a word of English was spoken. The place
even smelled foreign. This pocket of near-poverty, mid-European peasantry, seemed an oddity in Cassandra’s beloved New England. She didn’t know what to make of the pedlar’s jovial, even affectionate, manner with the pudgy-faced, big-breasted, wide-hipped and massively soft and wobbly bottomed women who waddled out in their flip-flop sandals and threadbare cotton flower-printed dresses. Dresses that clung to their sweaty nakedness.
The middle-aged women looked slovenly, loose and raunchy. Base. There was about these women, devoid of prettiness and artifice, no form of femininity. Not as the American dream depicted it and the girl understood it. What they did possess and exhibit was a kind of animal sexuality. It was here for the first time the girl saw the outline of a woman’s pussy; enormous, fully rounded, jiggling breasts with frighteningly large nipples. Over-ripe, broody females. No girdles or bras in the Blocks to hold the body and sexuality in check. The smell of garlic seemed to emanate from the very pores of a woman’s skin. One smelled of raw onions, and another carried the aroma of staleness. Another had taken on something of the strong Polish sausage she gnawed at. They were all, one way or another, like that. They smiled with teeth missing or capped in gold. With hands like hams they pinched or prodded the fruits and vegetables, hands rewarded by the pedlar with a smack and a sharp reprimand, then a smile. With shrill voices they bargained for pennies, and spat out their demands.
It was all so ugly.
The last customer walked away laden with brown paper bags. Cassandra watched the pedlar stride across the dry, dusty ground, an orange crate containing a customer’s order balanced on his shoulder. He knocked at a door and disappeared through it. Ten minutes later he emerged, the empty crate in one hand, a glass of cold milk in the other. He returned to the cab and his daughter, handed her the
glass of milk. The glass was worn away with scratches and chipped in several places. She felt revolted to have to drink from it. Even the glass was an icon of poverty. She refused the glass of milk. He drank it down for her. Why couldn’t he see the filth and poverty of the Blocks as she did? Why didn’t his soul wither as hers did when they visited?
He put the crate away, took her empty glass and disappeared into the house once more. The cab was stifling in the 99 degrees Farenheit. She sweltered. Felt the grime of dust and sweat, and was dizzy from the oppressive heat and misery of the place, its unrelenting ugliness.
She hopped down on to the hard, dried earth. A cloud of dust rose around her ankles. She was parched. The dust irritated her mouth. Desperate to escape the sun, the heat, Cassandra crossed the yard to find her father. She heard voices, her father’s and a woman’s. They were talking in Polish. A rank smell of stale cabbage and raw onion, rancid butter, sour milk, greeted her when she finally knocked on the screen door.
With the adults engrossed in their conversation, her knock went unnoticed. Cassandra, too distressed to be polite, opened the door and stepped into the room. A shaft of light from a window streaked across the small room, dark and dingy but surprisingly neat. She was mesmerized by what she saw in the channel of light. In an old chair sat her father, his arm around the waist of a child, sometimes speaking to her, at others to the woman across the table from him. Never had she seen such a look of affection in his eyes as he had for that child.
He addressed her as Mimi. She was a hauntingly beautiful, elegant-looking child, though skinny in the extreme, standing in her bare feet in her dress of near-rags. Cassandra could hardly take her eyes from the child. The long, golden blonde hair in ringlets, the violet eyes, a creamy white, unblemished skin. There was a luminescence about the child that held Cassandra’s attention. A very
female frailty that one expected to see only in a woman, not in a mere child, and certainly not one who lived in the Blocks. Mimi realized someone else was in the room, and turned to face the pedlar’s daughter. Cassandra was stunned by the pathos in Mimi’s eyes.
Reluctantly she stepped away from the pedlar, Mimi’s and Mashinka’s only friend, their only link with a world outside the Blocks. The woman, who looked neither better nor worse than any other woman on the Blocks, pulled out the empty chair next to her and offered it with a gesture to Cassandra. Reluctantly she accepted the chair. Seated next to the woman she was overwhelmed by her scent, whiffs of garlic and neat gin, so strong and sweet in the heat, Cassandra felt quite queasy. The woman drew from her bosom a grimy, wrinkled handkerchief. Bending forward she mopped Cassandra’s face. She cringed.
‘Your father a good man. Our friend,’ Mashinka told her in passable English.
The woman’s words were slurred, presumably from the effect of drink. Covered in a white oil-cloth that was yellowed and cracked with age, the table looked mean. It bore a chipped saucer of sliced sausage, a heel of stale bread, some green pickled tomatoes on a cracked flower-patterned plate, the inevitable bottle of cheap gin and two glasses. The woman offered her a slice of sausage. Cassandra declined but asked, ‘A drink of water, Daddy. Can I have a drink of water? Then can we go?’
She watched horrified as a fat, ugly, amber-coloured cockroach climbed up the apron of the oil-cloth and scuttled across the table. The woman casually swept it away with her bare hand. Cassandra heard it crunch under Mashinka’s shoe as she ground it into the floor. She watched Mimi wash an old, chipped jam jar and fill it from the tap. As she handed the glass to Cassandra, she caught for the first time a look of envy in Mimi’s eyes. Envy and a kind of hunger that lurked beneath a façade of pride.
Neither girl spoke. But for the remainder of that afternoon the fruit pedlar’s daughter was haunted by Mimi’s beauty, the air of mystery she sensed around her. Mimi had shone like a lustrous pearl in the ugliness of the Blocks, in the gloom of such poverty. How luckless, thought Cassandra, for her to have such a life. And yet the pedlar’s daughter felt no pity for the beautiful child. Mimi did not inspire that particular emotion. She radiated a special kind of charm, a seductiveness, a kind of power that in itself was a mystery, and mightily attractive. And Cassandra resented being swept up in it, just as her father had been. It worried her that she lacked the charisma of that mere urchin girl.
Six o’clock in the morning, and it was already unbearably hot and humid. A Berkshire Mountains day. Cassandra was waiting, in her usual place in front of the Post Office, for the Mac lorry to round the corner, stop and pick her up.
She had already hoisted herself on to the running-board and was swinging herself up on to the leather seat when she saw Mimi slide across it to station herself between father and daughter.
Surprised, she almost lost her balance. A strong arm shot out and caught her. Joe Pauley’s vice-like grasp lifted her to plunk her firmly next to Mimi. Bending across both girls now, he slammed the lorry door closed and pulled the door handle forward as far as it would go, locking them firmly in.
‘OK, girls?’
They nodded. Grabbing the stick shift, the pedlar threw the gears into first, and the heavily laden lorry lumbered forward. ‘Good. We have a big day ahead of us.’
For fifty-five miles, there was silence in the cab. The two girls sat, feet on the box of chains, bouncing up and down at each pot-hole in the road, trying to remain upright among the pedlar’s paraphernalia and Mimi’s pathetic belongings: a small cardboard suitcase tied with a piece of clothes-line, a patched but clean cloth bundle tied in a knot, and a never-worn pair of black patent leather shoes. These she held tightly in her lap. Contact between herself and Cassandra was limited to when the lorry, climbing steeply, took a sharp bend in the narrow winding mountain road at an ill-judged
speed, so that the girls fell against each other.
The climb was long and beautiful. A stream gushing over rocks and fallen trees on one side, the steep rise of the mountain on the other. Luscious and varied shades of green from the dense forest, broken by the sun, dappled the road. Mimi pinched hard the skin between her thumb and forefinger to make sure this ride was not a dream. She felt the pain, and reassured gave an inner sigh of relief. Still hot and humid, but less so because the temperature dropped with every few miles, they travelled up the shaded mountain road. It shocked Mimi that she had forgotten that life could be beautiful as this mountain road. She felt that no matter what happened, whether the lady who was to take her in liked her or not, she would at least have escaped the heat, the smell of poverty in the Blocks, for one day.
But once they left the wooded mountain, and the road turned to open hills and farms, and the sun was hanging unrelentingly hot in a cloudless sky, Mimi sensed how important it was that this stranger with whom the pedlar would place her really did want her. Mimi remembered Mashinka’s last words to her: ‘Be brave and good, do what you’re told, and work hard. Then one day your father will come and find you.’ No he won’t, she had wanted to tell Mashinka. He was lost to her. So many losses she had forgotten how to cry. Mashinka was the last person on earth whom she knew and loved, and soon she would be gone. Dead like Tatayana. But in her heart Mimi knew that Mashinka was right. One day her father would come and find her, and only that eased the pain of her aloneness, of being a wanderer dependent on the kindness of strangers just to stay alive. Her love for her father was all the life Mimi had, the rest was mere survival.
She sensed the strength and power of Joe Pauley the pedlar, the excitement he felt hurtling up the mountains in the huge lorry, and the anger and jealousy of Cassandra even-though she didn’t understand it. Nor did she want to.
She was too busy trying to adjust to being free from the Blocks and bracing herself for what was to come.
First stop Ida Hall’s General Store: grey-painted, wooden farm-house with a long, deep porch hung on the front, and two old-fashioned red pumps, one for petrol, the other for kerosene, in the yard in front of it. It was variously a grocery, an ice cream parlour, a candy store selling hard liquor, a fresh fruit and vegetable market. The pedlar pulled up to the entrance. The screen door opened. A boy carrying a basket of green beans walked out on to the porch. Having placed it among other boxes and baskets of produce, he ran back through the door, shouting, ‘The pedlar’s here, Mrs Hall.’
‘How many times do I have to tell you, Herman, he’s Mr Pauley to you? So you call him that, boy,’ ordered Ida Hall as she pushed the screen door open and strode on to the porch. It slammed behind her, and the tall, slim, stern-looking woman, plain and shining as if she had just been scrubbed, stood peering at them with hands on hips. She had a spinsterish quality about her: hair of silver grey pulled back off her face and pinned into a tight, hard bun at the nape of her neck, three yellow pencils with red erasers on the ends pronged into it. Mimi thought her formidable, and although she didn’t cringe with fear she did harden herself to face this woman in case she was spoken to.
From the cab it was all eyes on Ida Hall. The pedlar sighed. Never easy, she was still one of his best customers. He whispered rather loudly to Mimi, ‘You and Cassandra can go and sit on the steps. She makes the best doughnuts, fresh, maybe even still warm. Be good, and I’ll get you some.’
His daughter watched him take the shoes from Mimi’s hands and roughly push them on her feet, smile at her, stroke her hair and pat her on the shoulder. He said something in Polish, and she nodded her head. Then he opened the door and slung himself down. Walking around
the front of the cab to open the door for the girls, he called, ‘Morning, Ida.’
‘Mornin’, Joe. You’re runnin’ kinda late.’
‘Had to pick up this little girl. Delivering her over to Beechtrees. That put me behind,’ answered the pedlar. He walked to the rear of the lorry, let down the tail gate and hung up his scales.
The two girls scrambled down from the cab. The pedlar’s daughter greeted Mrs Hall politely from the bottom of the steps. Mimi said nothing.
‘Oh, brought a friend, have you? What’s your name, child?’
‘She won’t understand you. She doesn’t know English, and she’s not my friend.’
Both Cassandra and the woman looked surprised when the child answered in near-perfect English and without a trace of accent, ‘That’s not true. I do speak English, and my name is Mimi.’
‘Well, you’re a pretty little thing, Mimi. Got some spirit, too. I like that in people.’
‘What did I tell you, girls?’ boomed the pedlar from somewhere among his crates and baskets. They jumped at his words and ran up the steps to sit on the top next to each other, silent and staring straight ahead at the lorry and Herman and the pedlar unloading Ida Hall’s order.
Mrs Hall laughed. ‘Nice fresh milk. Just cooled from the cow, half hour ago. Frosted doughnuts. How ’bout that, girls?’
They nodded. Mrs Hall opened the screen door and turned to look at the still-surprised pedlar’s daughter. ‘Well, fancy that, Cassandra Pauley. Ridin’ fifty-five miles sittin’ next to somebody, and never sayin’ a word to ’em. Not even knowin’ they speak English. Ain’t you got no curiosity?’ She disappeared into the store, the screen door closing lazily behind her.
Mimi wished that Ida Hall had not said those things to
the pedlar’s daughter. She had sensed the girl’s hostility towards her. Would it be worse now? What must Cassandra be thinking? What Cassandra was thinking was: Why does this stranger from the Blocks get so much attention? First from Father and now Ida Hall. Cassandra looked at her. Mimi, sensing her angry gaze, turned around to face her, so that their eyes met.
Here, away from the monstrous Blocks, sitting in the sun, the trees and green fields around them, Mimi looked unhealthily pale, pathetically skinny in her cheap, pale blue flowered cotton dress with its little puffed sleeves. More refined, maybe, and even prettier than Cassandra had thought her the last time they met. But there was a sadness in her eyes that made Cassandra feel sorry now, not only for herself but for Mimi as well.
‘You should have said you spoke English,’ Cassandra told her angrily. Mimi remained silent, but kept her gaze on Cassandra. ‘How old are you?’ she asked.
Mimi hesitated. She was trying to decide whether she wanted to talk. Now there’s pride for you, thought Cassandra. And what a nerve, coming from where she did, and with a mother like hers, to think twice about talking to
me.
Mimi had made up her mind. ‘I’m nine years old.’
‘What grade are you in at school?’
‘I don’t go to school.’
‘Well, when you did. I mean, before the summer holidays.’
‘I’ve never been to school. Any time.’
‘Of course you have. Everybody has to go to school, that’s the law. Then where did you learn to speak English?’
‘I learned my languages at home, all my studies …’
They were interrupted by Mrs Hall with the plate of doughnuts, a jug of milk and two thick glasses, the kind that come free with grape jelly. ‘Languages? You speak more than English and Polish then, Mimi?’ She was bending down and handing the tray to Cassandra, who slid away
from Mimi to place the tray between them.
‘English, Polish, French and …’ Mimi stammered.
The pedlar joined them with a crate of corn on his shoulder, about to sling it down on to the porch at Mrs Hall’s feet. He added, ‘That’s a lucky thing, too. Ida, just look at this corn, sweet as a nut.’ And the pedlar ripped one side of a husk down to expose the bright yellow kernels. Mimi watched and listened to the business transaction at hand, riveted by the two adults’ sparring.
‘One ear don’t make a box, Joe.’ The pedlar gave her a look bristling with annoyance. He tore down the husk of a second ear of corn, then a third, staring at Ida Hall defiantly.
‘Six boxes,’ she told him, pulling one of the yellow pencils from the bun of hair at the nape of her neck. She wrote something on a sales pad extricated from the pocket of her dress. ‘We’ll settle price later, Joe. Now let’s see your lettuce.’ And Mimi was forgotten. Cassandra wondered why it was a lucky thing that Mimi spoke several languages. She had almost ceased wondering what the girl was doing there with them. And now this.
Mimi was hungry. She nearly always was, but usually pretended she wasn’t. She waited for Cassandra to take the first doughnut, to pour glasses of milk for them. Such self-control had become habitual. Even in the worst of times, Mashinka had found food for them. Maybe not feasts, but food enough to sustain them. Then the pedlar had entered their lives and had befriended them, and their money, what there was of it, seemed to buy more food.
Mimi held the glass of milk in her hand. It trembled: she had less control over her hunger today than usual. She raised the glass to her lips. The scent of the rich sweet milk filled her nostrils. She drank from the brimful glass. First a sip, most delicately, so as not to spill a drop. She closed her eyes for a second, an expression of relief when that gnawing sensation of hunger was stilled. Then she began to gulp
down the milk in great long swallows. The glass was almost empty when she caught herself, stopped, and looked around to see if anyone had observed her.
Cassandra was quick to lower her eyes, pretence prompted by shock at the look on Mimi’s face. Cassandra had never seen hunger like that before. She instinctively avoided creating the embarrassment Mimi must feel at having been caught out. Not knowing what to do about it, Cassandra gulped down more than half of her own glass of milk. Turning to Mimi, she told her, ‘I’m so hungry and thirsty.’ She filled their glasses again, and handed Mimi a doughnut. That moment of anguish – Mimi was usually a master at hiding it – vanished from her face. For a few hours Mimi had a friend, her very first girl friend.
The two girls understood that they were friends. But what to do about it? Mimi was aware of being able to draw people to her, and that was a comfort, but always short-lived.
She was wise, survival-wise, beyond her years. A series of traumas had ensured that. She no longer took the chance of feeling too deeply for anyone. A deep fear lingered that they might vanish the way Tatayana had, and her mother and father, her brother …
Mimi carefully wrapped the second doughnut in the coarse paper napkin still lying on the tray. Cassandra watched her. ‘For later,’ explained Mimi.
Cassandra took the doughnut from her and began unwrapping it. ‘You don’t have to save it, Mimi.’ Smiling she handed the partially unwrapped doughnut back to her. ‘We have a whole lorryful of food to eat, and my daddy always buys the biggest and best lunch. You’ll never be hungry again.’
Mimi stared at Cassandra and took the doughnut offered. How innocent, how lucky, how dumb about life this spoiled daughter of the pedlar seemed. But she was, too, kind and generous. And what would happen to me, Mimi wondered,
without the kindness of strangers? She wrapped up the doughnut again. ‘Just to be safe,’ she told Cassandra. She remembered too well her hunger. Not all strangers were kind.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon when the lorry pulled up. The massive ornamental iron gates were set into a fifteen-foot-high wall of stone that extended as far as Mimi could see. The pedlar stopped, idling the motor, and leaned from the cab, calling out, ‘Open up, boys, it’s Joe Pauley.’
Two men appeared at once. ‘Right on time as usual, Joe.’
Mimi watched, half in trepidation and half in excitement, as one of the men slipped a key into the huge padlock, and the two men pulled on the heavy chain, dropping it on the ground. Each took one side of the massive gates of elegant but rusting curves and twists of heavy metal. They lugged them open just enough for the lorry to pass through. Once inside the gates the pedlar stopped the lorry and cut the motor. He hopped down from the cab and gave a hand with the closing of the gates and the chain. The two young men had gun-belts strapped to their waists. Rifles leaned against the wall. He shook their hands. ‘All quiet, boys?’
What an adventure, thought Mimi. Have courage, don’t be a baby, she told herself in an effort to enjoy the sights and sounds that continued to amaze her since the pedlar had taken her from the arms of a weeping Mashinka, who had, even through her tears, kept assuring Mimi that all would be well.
‘Nothing but quiet, Joe. Gotta check you out anyway. You have an extra passenger.’
‘That’s right, a little girl.’
‘I sure do know that, Joe. The children have been down here at the gate twice, looking for your lorry. Those kids are hankering real bad for a playmate, something else to amuse them. Well, let’s have a look at her and her luggage.’