at her bedroom door ready to take on the big-shots. She spread her arms in a 'Well, how do I look?' gesture. She was dressed in a slacks suit she had recently made by hand from a glossy royal blue material. It had a close-fitting jacket and wide belled trousers that flopped when she walked, and on the side of her head she wore a cocky little bellhop's hat that she'd made from the end of a cylindrical oatmeal box and covered with the same bright blue fabric and a bit of netting. It was her version of a costume Bette Davis had worn in a film. She saw strong parallels between herself and the characters Bette Davis played: women struggling in an unjust world ruled over by unreliable males. Bette Davis didn't have to rely on men for anything. No, sir! Not Bette Davis!
I told her she looked great, just great! But I secretly wished she had chosen something like other people's mothers wore, something dowdy and simple, the kind of unchallenging clothes that people who need help from officialdom should wear.
Leaving me to take care of Anne-Marie and buy something for our lunch over at Mr Kane's, Mother went down the street, her bell-bottoms flopping with each pert step. I had suggested that she wear a coat because the March weather was unreliable, but she said that her old wool coat would spoil the effect of her Bette Davis suit... which was pretty much what I'd had in mind. But I was also afraid she might catch a cold that would lay her up for days or weeks with one of her 'lung fevers'. Over the time we lived on North Pearl Street, she would end up in the hospital four times with pneumonia, which was often fatal in those pre-penicillin days, and each of these episodes gave the social services a chance to take Anne-Marie and me away from her on the grounds of her being, in the literal sense, an unfit mother.
It was dark out when Mother got back to our apartment after a day of those demeaning delays, opaque instructions, complicated forms and accusatory interrogations that welfare systems use to protect society from fraud or laziness on our part, or excessive compassion on theirs. Her face was drawn and her eyes sunken with fatigue and hunger. She hadn't brought any money for lunch because she didn't have a purse that matched her Bette Davis creation and there were no pockets in the close-fitting slacks, so she had passed the bureaucrats' long lunch break on a park bench, simmering with rage. I was afraid she might have caught a cold, but she was feeling triumphant. She described her day over the supper of tuna fish sandwiches and reheated Campbell's tomato soup that constituted the limit of my culinary capacities. All in all, she thought she had been victorious in her skirmishes with the Lords of Misery. I wasn't so sure, and I winced at every '...so I gave her a piece of my mind, don't think I didn't!...' and '...well, I didn't let him get away with that crap!...' and '...I told them a thing or two, believe me you... '. But at least she had come home in fairly good health and with her spirit unbroken, ready to continue the fight tomorrow.
As it turned out, she was not obliged to engage the Establishment in battle the next morning. She had dressed up in her glossy blue Bette Davis slacks suit and was checking through the list of names and addresses that Mr Kane had made out for her, when there came a knock at our door. Our visitor was a rotund, tightly packed man in a shiny black three-piece suit and a derby, the first derby I had ever seen outside of comic strips, where their primary function seemed to be to get blown off by a wind that then rolled them into the road where they promptly got flattened by a steamroller that just happened to be passing by. The man wiped his hat band with a large handkerchief that he then applied to his copiously sweating face, before asking in a broad Irish accent, “Would you mind terribly, Missus?” Without waiting for an invitation he came into our apartment, lowered himself with a grunt into
I told her she looked great, just great! But I secretly wished she had chosen something like other people's mothers wore, something dowdy and simple, the kind of unchallenging clothes that people who need help from officialdom should wear.
Leaving me to take care of Anne-Marie and buy something for our lunch over at Mr Kane's, Mother went down the street, her bell-bottoms flopping with each pert step. I had suggested that she wear a coat because the March weather was unreliable, but she said that her old wool coat would spoil the effect of her Bette Davis suit... which was pretty much what I'd had in mind. But I was also afraid she might catch a cold that would lay her up for days or weeks with one of her 'lung fevers'. Over the time we lived on North Pearl Street, she would end up in the hospital four times with pneumonia, which was often fatal in those pre-penicillin days, and each of these episodes gave the social services a chance to take Anne-Marie and me away from her on the grounds of her being, in the literal sense, an unfit mother.
It was dark out when Mother got back to our apartment after a day of those demeaning delays, opaque instructions, complicated forms and accusatory interrogations that welfare systems use to protect society from fraud or laziness on our part, or excessive compassion on theirs. Her face was drawn and her eyes sunken with fatigue and hunger. She hadn't brought any money for lunch because she didn't have a purse that matched her Bette Davis creation and there were no pockets in the close-fitting slacks, so she had passed the bureaucrats' long lunch break on a park bench, simmering with rage. I was afraid she might have caught a cold, but she was feeling triumphant. She described her day over the supper of tuna fish sandwiches and reheated Campbell's tomato soup that constituted the limit of my culinary capacities. All in all, she thought she had been victorious in her skirmishes with the Lords of Misery. I wasn't so sure, and I winced at every '...so I gave her a piece of my mind, don't think I didn't!...' and '...well, I didn't let him get away with that crap!...' and '...I told them a thing or two, believe me you... '. But at least she had come home in fairly good health and with her spirit unbroken, ready to continue the fight tomorrow.
As it turned out, she was not obliged to engage the Establishment in battle the next morning. She had dressed up in her glossy blue Bette Davis slacks suit and was checking through the list of names and addresses that Mr Kane had made out for her, when there came a knock at our door. Our visitor was a rotund, tightly packed man in a shiny black three-piece suit and a derby, the first derby I had ever seen outside of comic strips, where their primary function seemed to be to get blown off by a wind that then rolled them into the road where they promptly got flattened by a steamroller that just happened to be passing by. The man wiped his hat band with a large handkerchief that he then applied to his copiously sweating face, before asking in a broad Irish accent, “Would you mind terribly, Missus?” Without waiting for an invitation he came into our apartment, lowered himself with a grunt into
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