The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (22 page)

The Brother who assigned you so many minutes of punishment time would write your name and the duration of your penalty in one of the small notebooks they all carried in their breast pockets (close to their hearts). They snatched out their notebooks as an arresting detective might snatch out his handcuffs. Their penalties were communicated to Brother Bernard, who was in charge of the Glory Hole, the name given to our chapel during the half hour in the morning between breakfast and the first class, and the 'free hour' in the evening at the beginning of Quiet Time, when we were supposed to do our homework and assigned reading. Instead, you had to report to Brother Bernard, who always sat in the back row of the chapel, and tell him how much of your punishment you intended to work off, usually five or ten minutes at a time. He would take note of your intention in a ring notebook open on his knee, next to a large pocket watch, and you would sit in silence until his watch's minute hand reached the next numeral, then he would raise his hand and you could join the penitents kneeling on the stone step of the communion rail with their arms spread out wide, for your minutes had to be worked off kneeling straight up on the stone (No slouching there, Murphy!) with your arms straight out and your hands closed into heavy fists. And if, after five or ten minutes, your quivering arms started to lower (Arms, LaPointe! Arms!), there was only one warning about slumping posture or arms that were not straight out. Upon the second show of physical weakness or failure of will, Brother Bernard would say, 'Get out, Kennedy!' and you had to leave the Glory Hole without receiving a single minute's diminution of the time you owed. For this reason, it was wise not to try to work off too large a chunk of punishment in one go, a bitter lesson I learned during my first session in the Glory Hole where, after thirteen minutes of struggling to work off a quarter of an hour, my throbbing shoulder muscles weakened and I could no longer keep my quivering arms from drooping an inch or two. Brother Bernard's voice echoed from the back of the chapel 'Get out, LaPointe!' and I got no credit for the thirteen minutes of torment... well, about seven or eight minutes of torment. The first five minutes weren't all that bad.

Failure to work off your time and get your name out of the punishment book by the first of the month meant that you couldn't go into the exercise yard during recess. Instead, you had to sit in the library under the eyes of a Brother, but you couldn't read. Just sit there, silent. You also had to report to the library to sit in silence from noon to one-thirty each Sunday, thus missing out on Sunday dinner, which was the best meal of the week. In addition, you lost 'all privileges'. At first, I couldn't imagine what these elusive 'privileges' could be. I had come just after Christmas, so I didn't know that there was a party and presents and cake to celebrate the birth of Our Savior, or that amateur performers came from the city once a month to give us a Saturday evening 'concert' in which local church choirs sang at us, or a man-and-wife team did 'dramatic readings' of poems and bits of novels, or a man who owned several reels of film and a projector would show us flickering silent films of the explosion of the Hindenburg zeppelin, and a parade of men in old-fashioned uniforms and plumed hats passing the camera jerkily, and bottles on an assembly line spinning and rushing by as they were filled with some liquid. These opportunities for cranks to display their hobbies and for local hams to inflict their meager talents on a captive audience were the 'privileges' you lost if you failed to work off your minutes by the first of the month.

There was a handful of vicious fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds who were so deeply in debt to Brother Bernard that they didn't even try to catch up; they turned up every afternoon to do a minimal required 'five', and let it go at that. They never ate Sunday dinner, never had the privilege of watching some old gal strangle a handkerchief as she sang the 'Indian Love Song', in a wobbly soprano, never had a chance to run and shout in the exercise yard. These boys vented their pent-up energy and resentment late at night in the dormitories; they were the punishment teams.

Anne-Marie and I had been separated upon arrival at the orphanage; she was put in the care of nuns in the girls' wing where, only six years old and having no idea where I was, she cried herself to sleep every night and reverted to bed-wetting, for which she was both ridiculed and punished. She was picked on because she was pretty and vulnerable. Bigger girls yanked her around by her long blonde hair. One afternoon a couple of weeks after we arrived, I was in the tangled mass of boys that ran and hooted and screamed wildly during the pandemonium of our unmonitored exercise periods, when I thought I heard Anne-Marie's little voice within the chaos. I searched for her among the tight-packed shoal of blue-uniformed girls who used to watch the rampaging boys from their side of the high chain-link fence that separated us, but before I found her the bells rang and we had to run back inside and leave the exercise yard for the girls. I later learned that I had walked right past her while she vainly called my name. I hadn't heard her through the din of screaming kids, and I failed to recognize her because a nun had cropped her hair in an effort to save her from being tormented by envious girls. She cried all that night, devastated because I had walked right past her, and she might never see me again. But the next day I walked up and down my side of the fence until I found her, and we held fingers through a chain link while she sobbed with a mixture of relief and misery. She leaned against the fence, closed her eyes, and took long slow breaths, drawing in the smell of wool and of boy from my jacket as she slipped into that deep peace that was necessary to her well-being. And that's how we spent our exercise periods for the next six weeks, pressed against opposite sides of the chain-link fence, until the day we were called into the director's office and told that we were being sent home. Our mother was well again.

After we got home I learned that the social workers had decided Mother was not healthy enough to qualify as a 'fit parent', so we kids would remain at the orphanage until we were sixteen, old enough to get jobs. But Mother unleashed the formidable weapon of her French-'n'-Indian temper to browbeat the astonished social workers into letting us live together again. But next time...

To avoid there being a next time, when Mother got sick again and had to go into a hospital, Anne-Marie and I did everything we could to conceal the fact that we were at home alone. I washed our clothes in the bathtub, and Anne-Marie kept the house tidy, if not clean, and we shared the meal preparation, which relied heavily on potato soup and peanut butter sandwiches. When I was shopping at Mr Kane's, I would mention offhandedly that my mother had told me to get this or that, or that she was feeling just fine, thank you... anything to deceive any welfare spies that might be lurking around. Our deception gave me a chance to hone the dramatic skills I had developed by playing all the roles in my story games. When I left the apartment in the morning to walk Anne-Marie to her school before going on to mine, I would stop at the door of our apartment and loudly say something like, “What's that, Mom? All right, I'll take care of it. You just get well. I'll see you this afternoon!” Just in case there were welfare people hiding in the upstairs hall trying to find out if my mother was taking good care of us.

But soon Mother was back with us and life returned to its routine. From time to time, Anne-Marie would wake up crying from a recurrent nightmare that she was back in the orphanage pressed against the chain-link fence, calling my name, but I just walked away and she was left alone. Mother would take her into bed and assure her that everything would be all right. Don't worry. One of these days our ship will come in and carry us far, far away. When I was very young, I had envisioned Mother's metaphorical ship pulling in at one of the Hudson River piers and, dressed in matching sailor suits, the three of us would walk up the gangplank and never look back. It was a pleasant and comforting fantasy until one day when Mother was describing the splendid house we would live in when I became rich and famous because I had a high IQ and could invent things, I suddenly realized with an icy sinking in the pit of my stomach that I was the ship my mother was waiting for, and it was my task in life to rescue us from Pearl Street. The weight of this responsibility made me dizzy. I began to involve myself in my story games more intensely.

Evening had descended as I sat on our stoop daydreaming. With a start, I suddenly realized that Mother was still waiting for me to come home and put on the potato soup for supper. In the kitchen I dropped the nickel Mrs McGivney had given me into our Dream Bank, which was an empty box of Diamond kitchen matches we hid on the shelf under the real box of matches to baffle any thief that might come snooping around. The Dream Bank was money saved up from Mother's occasional part-time jobs and from my shoe-shining rounds of the bars and taverns on Friday nights. Only the occasional drunk or some guy trying to impress a woman ever wanted a shine, but sometimes someone would give me a nickel or even a dime to get rid of me. Like selling apples on the street corner, shining shoes during the Depression was a way of begging without a total surrender of dignity. The money in the Dream Bank was supposed to be for special things, fun things, like the movies we went to every second Thursday night, but more often than not, it was squandered on dull, soon-forgotten necessities.

That evening after the last of my radio programs, I willed myself back to reality and went to sit on the edge of my mother's bed to play two-handed 'honeymoon' pinochle with her, while my sister cut out and colored dresses for her paper dolls. To save the cost of new paper-doll books, my mother would buy one then trace and cut out the clothes, tabs and all, onto paper she gleaned by cutting open brown paper bags and ironing them flat. In this way, one paper doll book did the service of half a dozen, lasting until the cardboard dolls got too limp from handling to stand up. My sister would spend hours drawing her own designs on these blank dresses and coloring them in, then hanging them onto the cardboard dolls in a series of 'fittings', all the while twittering animatedly as she played both the dressmaker and the customer, usually a rich, spoiled, very demanding actress. Anne-Marie loved to create styles from what she saw in the movies or in back-dated magazines that percolated their way down to Pearl Street, but her games were burdened, and to some degree spoiled, by my mother's need to see everything as a way to get us off Pearl Street. That summer, Mother was sure that Anne-Marie would find success as a famous Hollywood costume designer, just as she viewed my bookishness as a sign that I would become a university professor and take us all to live in some nice college town up-state.

Or maybe a doctor. As my mother was often in and out of charity hospitals, I guess it's natural that her romantic ideal was The Doctor, just as her implacable enemy was The Nurse, particularly those snippy ones who were jealous of the interest the doctors took in her unique 'lung condition', which never did receive a specific name like bronchitis or emphysema or pleurisy. For a short time I wove and unraveled games in which I was a famous doctor who somehow managed to save the lives of rich patients without having to come into physical contact with them. Even in my games I was too squeamish to deal with people on the level of blood and pus and... other liquids.

I always felt relieved when the honor, and the onus, of bringing our ship into port was bestowed upon Anne-Marie, if not as a famous fashion designer, then as a dancer. Even as a little kid, Anne-Marie loved music and used to sing and dance to our Emerson. Some neighbor politely told my mother that she had talent and was 'a born professional, believe you me!' and overnight it was decided that she was just the girl to replace Shirley Temple, who, after all, couldn't remain young and cute forever, could she? The next day Mother put Anne-Marie's hair up in bouncy sausage curls like Shirley's (we called her by her first name now that we were all in show business). The sausage curls would help talent scouts from Hollywood to spot her, and the next thing you knew, we'd all be in sunny California where we would live, as my mother's defective ear for idiom put it, 'on the flat of the land.'

...As differs from the slippery slopes?

But for this dream to come true, Anne-Marie would have to take tap dancing lessons, and that was out of the question, because group classes cost a dollar fifty per session and she would need two a week, which would have been almost half of the $7.27 we received from the welfare people. So the Shirley Temple dream was put on the shelf for a while, and we went back to fantasizing about the things we would own and do when I became a rich diagnostician, famous for my unique non-liquid 'hands-off' technique.

While I was shuffling the pinochle cards, I mentioned that I had made a nickel doing Mrs McGivney's shopping for her.

“Mrs McGivney?” Anne-Marie asked, shuddering at the thought of getting close to a crazylady.

“How did you happen to run into Mrs McGivney?” my mother wondered, and I told her how I was playing in the back alley, and she got my attention by tapping on her window with the nickel.

“And you went up to her apartment?” Anne-Marie asked.

“Sure.”

“You weren't afraid?”

“Nah.”

“You didn't go in, did you?”

“Sure. She gave me a cookie.”

“And you ate it?”

I asked Mother about Mrs McGivney, but she didn't know much: just that she had lived in that same house for as long as anybody could remember. “All alone in the world like she is, it's nice of you to run errands for her.” Mother patted my hand. “You're a good boy, Jean-Luc.” I had the feeling I was being pressured into visiting Mrs McGivney again. My mother had a great-hearted desire to help people, and when she couldn't manage it herself, she would volunteer me. But I never complained because, like she said, I was a good boy. A resentful good boy.