"I Like My Life"

The rugby neighborhood near Church and Flatbush Avenues in Brooklyn, N. Y. was mostly farm land 60 years ago. An immigrant German wood carver bought one of the fields, partly by his own labor put up a two-story frame house, settled in with his wife and their five-year-old daughter. The little girl's name was Josephine Amelia Claudius. After she grew up, she used to say that she was descended from one of the Claudian Emperors of Rome. This statement did not surprise Mrs. McGee and Mrs. McCormick, who lived near by, nor Milton Bruck at the stationery store, nor the people at the Lincoln Savings Bank on the corner. They knew Miss Claudius.

According to the considered opinion of the neighborhood, Miss Claudius was not insane. She was the smartest person in those parts. Everyone knew that she "had money." She also had a niece in North Carolina. Once Mrs. McGee remarked that the niece would certainly enjoy all that money some day. "She can enjoy it," said Miss Claudius. "I like my life."

Life for Miss Claudius began every day at 5 a. m. She slept on a pile of the thousands of old newspapers, some dating back to 1900, which were stacked in the rooms and halls of her house, crammed into broken windows. Bottles, broken furniture, boxes, cartons also filled her house. The roof was peeling, the paint had long since flaked from the outside walls. Hedges grew tree-high around the yard. Rigged behind one of the doors was a bundle of newspapers, a rope and a hammer, so arranged that if anyone entered without Miss Claudius' permission (never granted), the hammer would fall on the intruder's head. In the warm months, as soon as Miss Claudius got up, she repaired to her backyard, where she kept an old piano, weathering but still tuneful in the open air. She would play her piano, and sing to the birds. When the neighbors objected, Miss Claudius said: "The birds are up, why can't you get up?" Inside she had another piano, which she played in the evenings. On the piano at the neighbor hood Republican club, one of her favorite resorts, she sometimes played and sang opera arias. She could never pass a piano by. At Moscowitz's stationery store one day, she had a toy piano taken from the window, played until they made her stop.Occasionally, she played for the Democrats at their club. But she preferred the Republicans.

Miss Claudius could be mean. She was always chasing children out of her littered yard, sometimes caught and beat them. Once she saw a man short-cutting through her yard, made him pay 10-c- toll. Miss Claudius probably saved the dime. She spent almost no money, had no heat, light, water in her house. For a bathroom she used the Ladies' Room at the Lincoln Savings Bank. At closing time one afternoon, the employes heard strange noises in the Ladies' Room. Miss Claudius was inside, reading aloud from a law book. She knew and could quote law by the ream, to the confusion of municipal boards of estimate, aldermen, tax assessors, policemen. Once she was arrested for having ice in front of her house, obstructing the sidewalk. She got out her box camera, took pictures of ice in front of a couple of churches and a police lieutenant's house. She was acquitted.

Once Miss Claudius used to teach civics and English at Public School 54 in Brooklyn. In 1898, three years after she became a teacher, she bought a toy scooter--the kind which children push around with one foot. She went everywhere on her scooter, except to school, where she was afraid the pupils might borrow it. But she didn't walk to school: she bummed rides on the milkwagon.

Old Mr. Claudius died in 1920, in a subway wreck. Mrs. Claudius died in 1932. Miss Claudius stayed in the house with her mother's body for a week. After that, having been a teacher 37 years, she retired on pension and lived alone. Free now to do exactly what she wanted, she scooted all over Brooklyn, often scooted five miles to & from City Hall in Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge. Sometimes she took her scooter in the subway, rode over, scooted where she pleased in Manhattan. Frequently she dressed in bloomers. When Tammany Boss Jimmy Hines was on trial, Miss Claudius scooted to the courthouse, lugged her scooter inside, scooted through the halls until she was ejected.

Every ten years she repainted her scooter. Last time, it was red. She intended to make it blue during the next decade. Miss Claudius had to put away her scooter about a year ago. After that the neighbors saw her, little (less than five feet, less than 100 Ibs.), old, noticeably feebler, making her rounds on foot. Last fortnight Mrs. McCormick saw Miss Claudius fall down, helped her into the house.

The neighbors worried about Miss Claudius, and called the police. They could not get in the front door; she had barricaded it with a great stack of newspapers, Old Gold cartons, pasteboard boxes, bits of furniture. The officers climbed a ladder to a second-story window. When they touched the curtain the time-rotted cloth crumbled. In one of the upstairs rooms they found Miss Claudius, dressed, hatted and coated, lying on a stack of newspapers. She was dead. One of the neighbors remembered that she had said: "I want to die the way my mother did nobody to see me, bother me." They could not get a stretcher through the precious debris, so they had to carry Miss Claudius out of the house on Martense Street, like an old bundle.

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