Beggar’s Night -- 1973
It was Halloween and I was a daisy. Or at least a flower, bright and bursting with promise. White paper petals ringed my face, lush felt leaves dangled from my skirt. This was just my sort of costume—one of a kind, handmade from a pattern plucked out of the sale bin at Flower City. I used to be embarrassed by all our homemade stuff—the bread so much fatter and crumbly, busting out of the dainty sandwich bag, the blouse Mom made in a hurry, a trail of uneven stitches scattered down the front.
But then I learned to take charge of projects. I understood, in a way Mom never seemed to, that thoroughness mattered. I didn’t get in a hurry, learned the necessary tricks—how to slice homemade loaves almost as thin as Wonderbread, how to rip out stitches that didn’t look perfect. And Mom was relieved to let me take over—she had enough to worry about, still cleaning rooms at the hospital to keep a roof over our heads, trying to keep weekends free for Monroe. It wasn’t as if she needed to think about my Halloween costume as the days grew shorter, as she walked six blocks to work in darkness and returned to an hour of light.
It had been dark for over an hour already that Beggar’s Night. Gina, Liz and I had chosen to start our rounds on Marquette Street beyond a row of big square old houses tipping sideways just after the Hilltop Gardens Tap. My poster board petals were wilting already, dampened in the sleet. My blue corduroy coat was soggy—it was too cold to go without—and it covered my green stem-colored sweater and the top of my leaf skirt.
Nobody cared but me. All people wanted to see was an orange plastic pumpkin they could fill with Mars bars, suckers, and little cellophane packets of candy corn. If you were big like me—I was twelve, probably too old for trick or treating—people didn’t even look at you. Mostly they only paid attention to the cute little ones, which didn’t include any of us. This wasn’t even our neighborhood. A good thing, I decided. It would have been embarrassing running into somebody I knew.
Liz, just a year older than me, was supposed to be in charge of us, but she stayed well back from the houses so nobody could think she was a baby. Lately Liz thought herself too big for everything except making out with her boyfriend, Tom, on the couch when she was supposed to be babysitting. Still, somebody always put her in charge, of me and Gina and any other kids who happened to be around. We started out here in this tumbledown neighborhood because some cousin of theirs lived here. They had a million cousins everywhere. Like me, though, neither had a dad.
I knew who my dad was, though. I saw him once when I was little and I knew where he lived. He was in the phone book: Lamantia, Charles 1208 Eighth Street. I looked it up, he was right above Lamantia, John, my brother who lived on Bridge Street now with Rosalie. Then there was Lamantia, Rose on Fillmore Lane—that was us, Mom and me. I could call Chike, it wouldn’t be long distance. Of course, Mom would kill me if I did, but the bigger problem would be what to say.
“Hello. This is your daughter, Natalie—You know—Rose’s youngest girl. I’m twelve now—I may be starting to get pretty and I’m good in school. I can sew my own clothes, and I’m taking Spanish. That’s as close as you can get to Italian, at least in seventh grade.”
Surely he would want a daughter like me. Wouldn’t he?
But I was way too scared to call. Aggie, his wife, would answer and what good would that do? Or else he’d answer and then grunt at me, or yell, or act like I wasn’t his. “The hell you’re my daughter,” he’d say, or something worse. That was what he did with my sister, Mary, even though Mom said any fool could see that she was his spitting image (“poor thing,” Mom always added then.) Mom said I should thank my lucky stars he stayed away from us.
That night, though, it wasn’t so far to his house. I knew exactly where he lived—we were close. Lots of times we drove by his corner going up Division Street Hill. Mom always sniffed and pretended not to notice.
“There’s the old man’s place,”Johnnie always said, without looking that way, as if ignoring Chike’s house wasn’t worth the trouble.
“Let’s go down this way, on Washington,” I said to Liz, who just shrugged. Before we got to the next house though, Liz started goading Gina, threatening to chase her into somebody’s front yard. “Nightlight baby,” she sneered, “Everybody knows you’re still afraid of the dark. Better watch out for the bogeyman, nightlight baby.”
I, too, was afraid of those unknown houses, their broad porches sagging, the twiggy, overgrown hedges reaching out to grab your collar, accompanied that night by scary haunted house music drifting down from a window hung with skeleton lights. But I didn’t want Liz to notice me, to start in on me. Something about Liz seemed slightly crazy—maybe it was her wild black hair (Mom called it “kinky”) and her trouble-seeking eyes, the grin that said she was looking for the next thing to tear into.
“You got a boyfriend or something?” Liz cracked, turning her dangerous black eyes to me.
“No, I just … don’t want to wander too far,” I said, rolling my eyes, trying to sound practical, not afraid or plotting. “And the Sloat’s house is on the hill—I bet they’ll have really good candy.”
So we wound over to the twisty hill, stopped at the Sloat’s house at the edge of Lookout Park. I knew them from church, the kids went to a different school, though, so didn’t matter if they recognized me. Their candy wasn’t as good as I thought, either—stubby Tootsie Rolls and flattened Chiclets. After we hit that house, we went to the bottom of Eighth Street hill, just two blocks from Chike’s. I had never been so close, by myself, before.
Liz sang as we wandered along the bottom of the park. Houses sat on just one side of the street there. Only about half had lights on. “Me-eee ann—nnnd Mrs. Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Jones. We got a thannnnnggg, goin’ on.” Liz sang.
In the next block, we were back to houses on both sides of the street, and there were more lights. No scary music. I was considering whether to steer around his house, go down a block or something. Then Gina said, “I know where we are—that’s your dad’s house up there, isn’t it? You want to trick or treat at your dad’s house?”
Liz stopped. “Your dad’s house? You don’t have a dad,” she stopped mid-sidewalk to think this over.
“You ever been there? Does he have good candy?”
“Do too have a dad, nimrod. Everyone has one. And no, how would I know what kind of candy he has? But it wouldn’t hurt anything to stop, no reason to skip, if the light is on,” I was trying to talk myself into this. Trying not to talk myself out of it. Chike could come to the door, I thought. He might recognize me, though I wasn’t sure how. I wasn’t like Mary, I didn’t look like him. But a dad would know his own daughter, wouldn’t he? Maybe he had just been waiting for the right time.
“You are going to get it,” Gina said. The prospect of this stop worried her, but so did just about everything. “Your mom is not going to like this at all.”
“Why not?” Liz asked, coming alive, liking this better every minute.
“Who is going to tell her, anyway?” I tried to sound threatening. “It is just trick or treating, isn’t it? We’re just doing what we’re supposed to do. Getting candy.”
We were just two houses away. I felt very nervous. Damp cold seeped under my costume, or maybe sweat. My stomach twisted and suddenly I wanted to turn around and go up the hill home. Liz would have none of that.
“You go up there,” she said, pushing me toward the concrete stoop. She didn’t hang back. Even Liz was curious. My petals were really sagging in the mist, dangling onto my neck, and I stopped to straighten the tie under my chin, smoothed my damp hair, tugged at my coat.
“You guys, don’t be stupid, “ I said, willing them not to ruin this as I pushed the wet cardboard out of my eyes. “This is just normal—just trick or treating like everywhere else. Don’t say anything dumb or I’ll kill you. I really will.” My heart was beating in my ears and I could barely hear myself.
I knocked, not loudly enough, the first time. Maybe my dad was deaf?
I knocked again, with a fist, and the door opened mid knock. It was a fat woman, with watery-looking gray eyes. Aggie, I thought.
“Hello, youse,” she said, wiping dirt-colored hair back from a saggy face. “It’s just more kids,” she yelled behind her, into a room lit only by a loud TV. “Here ya go,” she said, dropping plastic-covered pieces of hard candy—fireballs or butterscotch, it was hard to tell in the porch light—into each of our pumpkins. I tried to see around her, but she was big. We must have looked like we wanted something else, because she stopped a minute in the door. “Something else you kids need?” Liz nudged me hard from behind.
“No, no there’s not anything else,” Gina said, grabbing my arm, pulling me back down the stairs. Moving quickly into the darkness beyond the stoop, I stopped for just a minute. I never told anyone what I saw, just beyond the door, past the woman. A white head sat back in a gold velveteen recliner, a head that never turned from the television. In my mind, I imagined him turning, staring at me, his blue eyes not mean and steely as everyone said, but amused, curious, perhaps even anxious about meeting me, his youngest daughter. “You must be Natalie, I’d have known you anywhere,” the man in my head said. “And just what kind of flower are you?”