passage bustled day and night with massive cargo ships and muscular little tugboats, all plying the channel beneath the spindly arch of the great Vincent Thomas Bridge.
Overlooking this scene was the first of many crummy lodgings Henry Cadmus would occupy with his mother: the Del Monte Hotel, owned and operated by his grandparents.
For them, it was the last of their ill-fated ventures, which had begun with their migrating from southern Italy to the Belgian Congo in search of a better life, only to be interned as enemy aliens at the outbreak of World War II. When the war was finally over they and their twin daughters were deported to Brazil, where the prospects were not much better, and then made their way to the United States. In America they embarked on a final, futile stab at innkeeping, squandering their meager savings on a slum hotel that provided lodging to hardship cases and sailors and longshoremen sleeping off a bender.
That was where Henry Cadmus was born.
The Del Monte Hotel of Henry’s earliest memories was a huge, dim catacomb; a Spanish-tiled behemoth bracketed by sooty palm trees, deserted except for loving giants who loomed out of the dark to spoon-feed him mashed soft-boiled eggs and cut-up orange wedges weeping sugared juice. As he graduated to more substantial food, there were oily sardines and olives, crumbly goat cheese, imported chocolate coins and marzipan, pry-top tins of black prune paste or golden malt syrup, polenta, amaretto-flavored cookies, creamy avocado on buttered toast—flavors he would always associate with childhood. He remembers once choking on a butterscotch candy, and the gargantuan who was his grandfather hoisting him up by the ankles and shaking him until he expelled the lozenge. Another time he swallowed a penny—a wheat penny—which was never seen again.
As Henry got older and began to roam the hotel’s corridors, he took great interest in the gloomy surroundings, and was unperturbed by sights such as huge wharf rats crossing from one doorway to another, giant cockroaches and red centipedes in the showers, or clutches of blind pinky mice about to be flushed down a toilet as part of the ordinary housekeeping routine. He caught vague glimpses of bloody floors being mopped and his grandfather running up and down the stairs with a shotgun. Most vividly of all, Henry recalls once hiding with his mother under the bed as a strange man knocked on their door, calling softly, Vicki, open the door. Henry? Come out here, boy, I have a present for you. I can hear you in there—I know you’re both in there. Henry, come open the door so I can give you your birthday present. Come on out and we’ll go get cake and ice cream. After the man left, Vicki waited a good long time to make sure he was gone, telling Henry it was all a game, just a silly little game. When she finally opened the door the hallway was full of thick smoke—there was a fire somewhere. Trying not to breathe, they made their way out of the building to the front sidewalk, where she told him to sit still while she ran back in to help her parents and the other few tenants get out. Amid the commotion, Henry noticed the hotel’s big gray tomcat lying dead in the middle of the road. As firemen and policemen came and went, and Vicki flirted with them, he sat on the curb watching the cat’s curious metamorphosis from a familiar cat shape to a mangled pink pulp and finally—traffic taking its toll—to bits of flattened pelt curing in the sun.
The fire was blamed on Gladys. And since Gladys died in the fire, she made no defense. Of the mostly faceless tenants, Gladys was only one Henry ever remembers feeling close to. She was a hugely fat, sweet-natured African lady who was close friends with his grandparents and doted on him, always having a piece of butterscotch candy ready when wee Henry visited her squalid room. She told African stories and sang African songs and read people’s fortunes and had a collection of African masks and other artifacts that were deeply fascinating to Henry. Because of Gladys, he can never look at Aunt Jemima or any other mammy stereotype without a guilty rush of affection. Poor Gladys, who died smoking in bed…or so he was told. And why would they lie?
Of the other guests, he mainly remembers doors ajar and glimpses of beer bottles and stockinged feet propped on coffee tables beside