A Mother’s Spirit. Anne Bennett
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be doing a tour of the factories, as he had done before.
‘No, not yet,’ Joe said, when she asked him. ‘I am off to see the Empire State Building opened officially by President Hoover first. D’you want to come along with me and see it for yourself?’
Gloria stared at him as if she couldn’t believe her ears. What good was watching the opening of the Empire State Building – or any other building, come to that? It wouldn’t affect their lives in any way. They needed money and Joe hadn’t time to go gallivanting.
‘See it for myself?’ Gloria repeated scornfully. ‘I have no desire to see it and I am surprised that you want to. As you have no work, shouldn’t you be out looking for something?’
‘I will look for something,’ Joe said. ‘The opening shouldn’t take all day.’
Gloria, however, was dreading going back to the way they had lived before, and worry caused her to lash out at him. ‘Joe, I don’t believe that I am hearing this,’ she cried. ‘You know yourself that there is not a chance of a job unless you are out early. You have said so yourself. When you are watching the President cutting the tape, as if you are a man of leisure, just remember that.’
‘And when have I ever wasted time?’ Joe ground out.
‘Well, you are proposing to now,’ Gloria retorted.
‘Dear God, woman …’ Gloria saw the rage building up in Joe. His face was crimson and his eyes flashed fire. She waited for the onslaught, but it didn’t come. Joe didn’t trust himself to speak. He couldn’t trust himself to stay in the same room as Gloria either, and he wrenched the door open, then slammed it so hard behind him that it shuddered on its hinges.
Gloria sank onto a kitchen chair, and burst into tears. She knew how unjust she had been. Joe was out every day, in all weathers, and was willing to work his fingers to the bone for them. Why hadn’t she gone with him to see the opening of that magnificent building? He would have been so pleased if she had, but instead she had driven him out with her angry words.
Norah lay in bed and listened to her daughter weeping. She knew Gloria was very near breaking point, for she had heard it in her voice, and now she faced the fact that she was partly to blame. Instead of being a help to her – to them both – she had been more of a hindrance. True, the way they lived now was as far from her former life as it was possible to be, but it was the same for Gloria and she hadn’t crumbled, but had soldiered on, making the best of it, though she was now at the end of her tether.
It was time that she herself took an active role in the family again, Norah decided, and she threw back the covers.
Gloria heard her mother’s approach with surprise. She lifted her tear-stained face and said, ‘Are you all right, Mother?’ for Norah spent much of her time isolated in her room. ‘Is there something I can get for you?’
‘There is nothing you can get me, girl, and yet I am definitely not all right,’ Norah said. ‘I am selfish and self-centred.’
‘Oh, Mother …’
‘Hear me out, Gloria. I have watched you and Joe struggle for months and as yet have not lifted a finger to help you.’
‘Mother, we understand. What has happened was a terrific shock for you.’
‘It was a terrible shock for all of us and my withdrawing from life helped no one. Your father took the coward’s way out, Gloria, and yet I envied him. At one point it crossed my mind to make an end to it all when I realised that I had lost the house. I felt that I was in despair. But I have finally got over that nonsense now, and for all he seldom complains I imagine Joe gets as fed up as the rest of us.’
‘Yes,’ Gloria said. ‘And I have driven him away.’
‘You are under strain as well,’ Norah said. ‘And that is why you said what you did – because you know your man works himself to death for the pair of us.’
‘I know,’ Gloria said, ‘and I will apologise to him as soon as he comes in.’
Many hours later, when the early summer’s evening had a dusky tinge to it, Joe arrived home, worn out and footsore. His face was grey and lined with fatigue. Norah, looking from him to her daughter, felt that her presence wasn’t necessary and took herself off to her room.
Gloria said gently, ‘I was worried about you.’
‘Were you?’ Joe asked wearily. He looked at her steadily. ‘I don’t think you were. You probably just wanted to establish that I was out looking for work and not wasting time.’
‘No, Joe,’ Gloria maintained, ‘I was truly worried. I thought something might have happened to you and I couldn’t have borne that. I am so sorry about what I said to you this morning. I was wrong and I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth.’
Joe’s face lightened a little, but still he asked, ‘Do you really mean that?’
‘Yes, Joe,’ Gloria replied earnestly. ‘I mean it from the bottom of my heart.’
‘That, my dear girl, is all I wanted to hear,’ Joe said, and as he held her closer she heard the rumble of his stomach.
She pulled away from him slightly. ‘Joe, you’re hungry.’
‘Well, I haven’t eaten all day,’ Joe said. ‘You can’t buy anything when you haven’t even a dime in your pocket.’
‘Oh, Joe,’ Gloria said, ‘I only have bread in, but I have milk and tea.’
‘Tea and bread is a banquet to a starving man,’ Joe said, giving Gloria a peck on the cheek. ‘Lead me to it. You must feed me up anyway, for I have at least a day’s work at the docks tomorrow.’
Gloria used to love the docks, she remembered, and would nag her father to take her as often as she could. It had all stopped when she was fourteen and Joe had put his life on the line to save her from greater injury or death. That, however, had been in her other life when she had been living, rather than merely existing. Now she said, ‘Oh, Joe, that’s wonderful.’
‘Aye, isn’t it,’ Joe said. ‘I would have hated to come home with nothing, and I only got this because I can drive.’
‘Oh? What are you driving?’
‘Trucks. One of the hauliers is a driver down, and I wish the man no harm, but I hope he takes a while to recover from whatever it is he is suffering from.’
‘Ooh, yes,’ Gloria said. ‘A whole week would be lovely.’
‘A week,’ said Joe. ‘That is nothing at all. I was thinking more of six months or so.’
‘And I would say you were tilting at windmills.’
‘You shouldn’t be saying anything at all,’ Joe said. ‘You should be putting food on the table before I start gnawing on the table leg.’
Two months later Gloria looked down from her fourth-floor window to the dusty yard below and thought she had died and gone to hell. She could see the doors to the communal lavatories sagging open on broken hinges, and the dustbins spilling onto the yard, and she wanted to die. She never in all her life thought that people lived like this, let alone that she would be counted as one of them.
She faced the fact that she was no longer a person in straitened circumstances, but part of New York’s poor, and that realisation was hard to take. They no longer had an apartment, for despite Joe’s semi-permanent jobs at the docks, they couldn’t pay the rent. Instead they had rooms in a tenement building. Her mother had the one bedroom, and in the other room the family had to live, Joe and Gloria sleeping on the settee, which opened up as a bed at night. Any basic cooking would have to be done in what was laughingly called ‘the kitchen’, which housed a battered table and four rickety chairs, a sink under the one cold tap, a couple of shelves and two gas rings. The lighting too was from gas. They had no bathroom, and the toilet was a shared one, with access to it across the dusty