WOMEN: I Like My Life

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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¢ 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.