East Chase Street ca. 1944

East Chase Street ca. 1944

1. After dark,

passing cars spread white sheets of light

on the ceiling of the 2nd floor front bedroom.

How comfy to know I’m put to bed in the room

where my grandmother will soon join me. Plus

I can tell from the headlights that the machinery

of Baltimore keeps going without me doing a thing.

2. Jack Flood’s place

was what my scary one-eyed step grandfather

called the derelict auto repair shop rotting and rusting

across the street. “He used to keep his women

up on the 2nd floor.“ “Fallen women,” Grandmother

whispered. I pictured women in denim overalls

who had somehow been injured in the War Effort

making the fenders and radiator grills that still spilled

onto the sidewalk. The iron sign said AUTOREPA.

I knew it meant AUTOREPAIRS but I still thought

Autorepa would be a swell name for a make of tractor

along with the John Deeres, International Harvesters,

and Cat Diesels pictured in my step-grandfather’s

Camels- yellowed copies of The Farm Journal..

3. The Red Cross Volunteer place

was three or four houses farther down Chase Street.

Each house we passed had a Gold Star in its bay window.

My grandmother and I walked there every morning.

I forget what she did. What I did was so important

the Red Cross ladies made me a kid-size Red Cross cap

and gave me a big magnet for picking up Invisible Hairpins.

Ladies went to the Red Cross place to get their hair done--

permed or blued.. It was also Miss Viola’s Beauty Parlor.

4. Miss Alma

lived on the third floor of the house on Chase Street.

She was one of my grandmother’s church ladies.

My mother would drop me off at my grandmother’s house

every morning before going to School 49 to teach English

to the Accelerated Middle School boys and girls.

Miss Alma was very tall and slim, with black hair slicked

into a bun. In her long black dress she would float

without making a sound down the stairs to the second floor,

to the first floor, down the hall to the front door, out onto

the fancy tiled vestibule, down the marble steps, out

into her world, whatever that was. I never saw her return.

When my mother was in her nineties, her heart doctored

by one of her girls from School 49, I mentioned

Miss Alma to her, thus adding to Mother’s theory

that I was crazy and a liar. Uncle John, my mother’s

much younger step-brother, remembered Miss Alma

and even her last name: Sinclair. Miss Alma Sinclair.

5. The marble steps

to the huge old brownstones on East Chase Street

were not like the ones you see in pictures of the city.

Housewives on Chase Street hired an old lady

with a scrub bush and bucket to do the steps each month.

’Common,” my mother called people who sat on the steps

on summer nights--part of a phrase ending “…as dirt.”

My grandmother even said the family on the steps

a few doors away was Common. But it was common,

to sit on the steps as the July sun moved west all the way

to Howard Street. The marble was gritty from coal dust

and the dirt of the Elevated stop a few blocks over

but cool, for my grandmother and step-grandfather

and especially to me in my shorts. All of us fanned

ourselves with church fans, cardboard pictures on sticks,

6. The castle

you could see from the Chase Street front steps

turned orangey-pink in the summer sunset.

It had towers and turrets and a scalloped roofline.

I knew it was really the Jail, but I wished

people would stop telling me so. Rapunzel herself

might let down her hair from one of the windows.

7. The Funeral Parlor

was a brownstone mansion my mother and I passed

as we headed down to my grandmother’s house. It had

an imposing stone arch over a yard full of black cars.

“Limousines,” my mother said, “and hearses for coffins.

“t’s The William Cook Funeral Home. Think of those

Gold Stars you see on Biddle Street, one per lost son.”

Later in junior high school we sang a song that went

When you die better try William Cook’s.

It’s the best undertaker in the books.

Its coffins are much cheaper

and they’ll bury you much deeper

When you die better try William Cook’s.

We sang it to the tune of a well-known commercial:

When you buy better try Hochschild Kohn

It’s the store Baltimore calls its own. . . .

A few years later I was a very reluctant debutante.

My date for some big party stopped at William Cook’s

to pick up two debutante-boys’ dates. I was shocked

to realize it was the Cook sisters’ family home. They

wore fabulous dresses pouffed out over huge hoops.

Bridal Hoops, that what whose Gone with the Wind

hoops were called. They hiked up and out in front

in the car. They’d have been just right for a black limo.

- - -

8. Street smarts and my life in crime

My parents felt I should get to know my way

around downtown. “Walk west (where the sun sets)

Walk up a block or two. You’ll find Biddle Street

and Preston Street.” I figured that Preston Street

was named after my father, Robert Preston Harriss.

But Biddle? Was that some kind of stupid baby talk?

Farther north was a Read’s Drugstore and a Five & Ten.

Both carried paperback books with guns and bosoms

on their covers. I would walk there by myself and

read those books till I could see it was almost dusk then

I’d take home with me whichever one I was reading.

Nobody ever caught me. I always got home on time.

9. Little Mysteries

that I used to ask my grandmother about included odd items

I’d see in McCrorie’s so-called NOTIONS DEPARTMENT

like the long skin-colored balloons at one of the counters.

She told me that they were to protect the hardworking fingers

of people who sewed. She didn’t seem to hear me when

I wanted to know why she never wore them, even though

she made all my clothes and bled on some of them.

10. Coal Dust

covered just about everything on Chase Street.

Grandmother’s house had brown velvet portieres

and brown upholstery with was a layer of black dust

on top of it all, even her windowsill African Violets.

I liked to sit on the dusty cellar steps to watch her

go down there in a bathrobe and my step grandfather’s

way too big bedroom slippers to shovel the day’s coal

into the furnace. Her ancient Bible Story Book

had a wonderful scary illustration of wicked people

shoveling babies into Moloch’s Fiery Furnace.

Grandmother was only keeping the house warm.

I understood that the Bible Story Book was just

what it said it was, a bunch of tall tales. Stories.

11. Uncle John’s furlough

brought Uncle John home on a short leave.

He stayed in the way-back second floor bedroom

on Chase Street. Often he and his fiancée Jane

would nap in his room. “So sweet,” my grandmother

would whisper to me in the hall. “They love each other.

And the door’s open.” They married when he came

home for good. “John and Jane.” Cute as a kiddie book..

12. My Criminal Life

continued. After the War ended Uncle John came back

to his home on Chase Street. If I happened to be there

he’d take me for a ride in the family’s old DeSoto.

At first I’d merely sit on his lap and shift the gears.

He did the pedals and the steering. When I turned ten

he let me drive on my own around the farm his one-eyed

father owned. Uncle John smoked Luckies in the passenger’s seat

13. Lessons I learned

a few years later when my Ps asked me if those boys

I ran around with drank: NOOOO I howled

thus assuring Mother and Father that they drank like fish.

The Boys’ Latin School where my drinking buddies

from Bolton Hill went had a fraternity called Gamma

Beta supposedly standing for God and Brotherhood

but really for Gin Belt. That was the semi-official

name of the boys’ prestigious neighborhood near

Chase Street. My Ps seemed rather relieved to learn

I could drive. “Grab their car keys if they’re drunk.”

14. I celebrate Memorial Day

thinking about Chase Street. Gold Stars, Red Cross. dust..

All over Baltimore celebrants are driving drunk. Thanks

to my family and especially Uncle John I’m alive. Still.

***