The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (30 page)

Inquisitive and quick-minded, Mother had led her class in the annual statewide Regent Examinations, and her father talked of her becoming the first of his family to earn that sure passport to success and economic security, a high school diploma. But during the summer of her sixteenth year she suddenly became aware of boys as boys, and outlandish clothes became a vital form of self-expression. She tried lipstick for the first time and learned to strum a banjo/ukulele at evening sing-alongs down on the platform of her father's train station, where the town's young people gathered to watch the late train pass on its way from Montreal to New York City, and to sing the popular tunes that adults despised for both their listless 'crooning' and their dangerous messages of saucy independence. To her surprise and pleasure, she discovered that the fashion ideal had shifted from the ample, pigeon-breasted Gibson Girl to her own trim tomboy figure which, together with her zest for life, constituted ideal attributes for a girl of the Charleston era. She exchanged her role as a competitor and a buddy of the town's boys for the unsure but exciting role of a desirable hellion with stockings rolled down to below the knee. Her desire to dive into the foaming currents of life caused her to quit school, leave her home town and take a job in a textile factory in Hudson Falls, where she spent most of her wages on the flimsy fashions she could wear to such advantage as she ran with a fun-hungry gang in roadsters with rumble seats, and entered dance marathons to the challenge-and-response patterns of ragtime, or danced romantic 'slows' to the suggestive croon of Russ Colombo or the nasal mewl of Rudy Vallee, both of whom would be eclipsed in her affections when sound came to the movies and millions of American women fell under the spell of Maurice Chevalier's irresistibly pendulous lower lip. This was Mother's golden age, her heyday. She got into a shouting match with a suggestive foreman at the cotton mill (that French-'n'-Indian temper of hers), so she quit to become a waitress in a roadhouse frequented by hooch-runners bringing whiskey down from Canada. She also met laughing, carefree college boys who were working through their summer vacations and spending most of their nights singing, strumming their banjos and ukuleles, and drinking hooch from pocket flasks. Life was bright and gay and good, and she was at the very center of it.

Then, at the age of twenty, she met and instantly fell in love with my father, who came from that sophisticated metropolis, Philadelphia, and who had an alluring whiff of the bad and the dangerous about him because he worked with rum-runners, played cards with criminals, and possessed the con man's facile charm. He had the thick, slicked-down hair and the arch profile of a model for Troy shirt collars, and he fulfilled those twin lofty ideals of the 'Twenties Woman: he was a good dresser and a great dancer. Most wonderful of all, this exciting paragon preferred her to all the other girls. He thought she was special!

They married, but after two days of honeymoon, he met some men who had a good thing going in Florida seaside property and could use a slick talker as a front man, so he left, explaining that he'd only be away for a week at most. A week passed, then two, then a month. And suddenly he dropped out of sight, and she had to return to her people and seek work locally.

But she couldn't believe she'd been abandoned. There must be some mistake. She made up stories about what might have happened to prevent his return. Several months passed and she was noticeably pregnant before she could accept that she had been deserted. She plunged into bitterness, hurt and disappointment. Didn't anyone love and want her? Not even her father, who had sent her away to live with her aunts after her mother died? It must be her fault in some way. What was wrong with her? It was in this state of self-doubt and self-loathing that she gave birth to me, and she attached all her love and hopes for the future to a baby boy who would never abandon her and always love her. As a little girl, my mother had dreamed of becoming a success in life because 'that would show them all'. And if she couldn't do it herself because some irresponsible man had abandoned her, then her boy would go out into the world, capture success and recognition, and bring it home for them to share. Together, they'd show them!

Mother's stories about the things she had gotten up to as a wild hoyden in Fort Anne would be punctuated every fifteen minutes by the passage of a rattling, clanging, glittering block of glass and light, the Clinton Avenue trolley car with its motorman in front working his foot bell and accelerator lever, and the conductor in back, responsible for collecting fares and keeping the contact wheel on the wire, both wearing black uniforms and visored caps with wicker sides to ventilate their heads. At that late hour, there was only a handful of half-asleep passengers. A moment of brilliance and noise, and the ground-shaking trolley had passed and was going down the dark street towards its union with Pearl Street at the bottom of the hill, taking its light and animation with it. If Anne-Marie was particularly sleepy, we would consider taking the next trolley, but we usually rejected the idea as a shameful waste of money because a ride down the entire Clinton Avenue hill only cost a nickel, so it seemed prodigal to spend a nickel to go only halfway down. We would continue on, Anne-Marie's feet numbly slapping on the pavement as she walked between us, eyes closed, half-asleep, relying on us to guide her.

Mother's favorite story was the one of how she trained all through the fall and winter of her fourteenth year to compete in the annual long-distance race down the frozen Champlain Canal to Fort Edward. This skating competition was held at night, when the temperature was lowest and the ice most stable. With the crack of the starter's gun, she broke into the lead, then, bent low over her skates, her hands clasped behind her back, she sped over the black ice between banks of ghost-gray snow, chasing a ripple of reflected moonlight down the ice, as the uneven surface beneath her skates made her feet thrum, and the wind stung tears from her eyes. The long, rhythmic click-hiss, click-hiss of the Patented Tubular Racer Skates her father bought her especially for the contest; the shouts and laughter of her competitors fading behind her as she began to outdistance them; the bonfires farm children built along the way to greet the racers with cups of hot chocolate, but Mother passed by and skated on, intent on victory, until she crossed the line scratched on the ice at Fort Edward a full fifteen minutes before her closest competitor. She described that race through the frigid moonlit night with such intensity that the details of her triumph are frozen into my memory, as though I had been there, as though it had been mine; this victory made her famous for a whole winter. Her feat was even mentioned in the Glens Falls paper. She was someone, a success!

The story of her great race and the one about my grandfather forcing those stuffy ladies to sip afternoon tea with his young wife were the ones I most often asked my mother to re-tell as we walked back home after Dish Night at the Paramount.

It began to snow as we were returning from the movies late one winter night, large lazily tumbling flakes that Anne-Marie and I tried to catch on our tongues. The last Clinton Avenue trolley clanged and rattled past us, snow swirling around it like the white particles in a 'snowstorm' paperweight. When we got home, Pearl Street was deserted and strangely silent in the muffling snowfall. We climbed our stoop, and I looked back down the street and saw our tracks on the new-fallen snow, three sets of footprints stretching down the sidewalk to a pool of streetlight and disappearing into the darkness beyond, and already the snow was filling our footsteps in. I felt sure there was something portentous in this vision, something symbolic and oceanic. A woman and two children had passed through the storm and the darkness. Seeking what? Fleeing what?? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note26#note26” ??[26]?

Nothing so stimulated my imagination as a raging storm late at night... sudden lightning and sky-shredding claps of thunder so close together that I gasped again in mid-gasp. I felt safe with my Hudson Bay blanket around my shoulders as I watched Nature rage out in the street, although there was always a tinge of guilt at being snug and dry while down-and-outers pressed into doorways with newspapers stuffed under their shirts for warmth. Silver streaks of rain hatched through the cone of light from our streetlamp, and plump raindrops exploded on the cobblestones until swirling, frothing water gurgled up through the gutter grill, sheeted across the sidewalk and ran down basement steps to flood coal bunkers and leave them dank and smelly.

Autumn windstorms sharpened my senses but dazzled them at the same time, as if electricity and friction caused me to read fast and think in a hectic, scattered rush. Lots of thinking, little thought. And when the night wind moaned around the corners of buildings, wuthered in basement wells, fluted through chimney pots, and sucked at the loose panes of my window, rattling them in their crumbling putty, I would turn newfound words in my mind, particularly windy-sounding words like 'vicarious' and 'ethereal', or I would grapple with big ideas like Free Will and Sin... especially sin. Has any word ever been so yeasty as 'sin'? I would weave sounds and unravel meanings while the rain danced on the cobbles and the wind sucked at my window.

Baffling thoughts on blustery, wind-dazed nights.

I was staring out into the street one night, empty-minded, coasting, when my attention was snagged by a drunk having trouble negotiating the cracks in the pavement. While looking back over his shoulder swearing at the crack that had tripped him up, he stepped off the high curb on our side of the street and lurched across to the streetlamp, which he embraced just in time to save himself from falling on his face. It was Old Joe Meehan, tyrant of the Meehan tribe.

Sometimes at night there would be a sudden shout or a scream from within the Meehan warren, and ten or twelve of them would come pouring down their stoops into the street, arguing, snarling, fighting: human magma ejected by the heat of some internecine friction, probably over those breeding rights and sexual tangles that were the constant subject of the block's indignant but riveting gossip. I sometimes found my imagination wandering to what sorts of things those Meehans got up to. I knew it was shameful and sinful and ugly and foul and all that... but it was also intriguing for a ten-year-old boy. Not that I wanted to do anything. No, no, I just... well... wondered.

Sometimes the Meehan warren contained as few as twenty people, sometimes twice that many. Births, runaways, imprisonments, desertions, hospitalizations, deaths, benders, and simply getting lost for a few weeks kept the population variable, so no one knew exactly how many Meehans there were at any given time, but the number slowly and continually grew because, whatever their other moral defects might be, the Meehans were good Catholics who scrupulously abjured birth control.

From the mailman the block learned that the Meehans received six weekly welfare checks, one for each 'family'. In addition, they got five dollars per adult from the ward heeler whenever there was an election of any kind, a gift from the O'Conner Gang to make sure that the Democratic Party continued to enjoy the full support of the Meehans. There was always a riotous party over at the Meehans' on election nights, one that inevitably ended with random couplings and a great tangled fistfight in which some Meehans would gang up on others and try to throw them out onto the street. Finally the police would arrive and there would be a fight between the police and the suddenly reunited Meehans, nightsticks on the one side, iron rods, chains, and gravel-filled socks on the other. Some Meehans always ended up in the slammer after election night, and others ended up pregnant.

I have to confess that my mother also sold her vote at each election for five dollars from our perspiring, derby-hatted ward heeler, but she refused to feel guilty about it because we needed every cent we could get our hands on. And anyway, she was devoted to Roosevelt, who she felt understood her problems on a personal level and would never let her down, a feeling shared by most of the poor, so she would have voted the Democratic ticket anyway. She justified her vote-selling by claiming to have gypped the ward heeler out of his five dollars—and let that be a lesson to the vote-buying bastard!

I was passing the mouth of our alley on my way home from the library late one evening, and I was startled by a voice. “Hey, you! Professor! Come here!” It was Patrick Meehan. Oh-oh.

Patrick Meehan and I had never exchanged a word, and that was just fine with me. Patrick was seventeen, and he was big and tough and stupid. He had earned his reputation as the meanest kid on the block by beating up any boy or man who fooled with his simple-minded sister, Brigid. And not just beating them up, but pounding them until they had to go to the emergency room of the hospital. Patrick could only see out of one eye; the other was sunken and had a milky membrane over it ever since it had been poked with a stick during a fight with two kids who had used Brigid. The two kids ended up in the hospital, and Patrick went back into reform school for six months.

So you can see why his shout of, “Hey, you! Professor! Come here!” brought me to a standstill at the mouth of the alley. I considered hotfooting it to the safety of my apartment, but I would have to go back out onto the street sooner or later, so the best thing to do was to face the music.

“Come here!”

I walked up the alley, my knees watery. “Hey, what's up, Patrick? How's it going?”

“Lookit, professor, your... mother... she's...” he started. But he had difficulty dragging words out of the thick tangle of his thoughts.

“What about her?” My voice was stronger. I wasn't going to take any crap about my mother, even from Patrick. But it seemed unfair to get beaten up by him when I'd never had anything to do with Brigid. Well... all right... maybe I had sat up a few nights, looking across at the Meehan warren, wondering what sort of... things... might be going on over there, but you wouldn't beat a kid up for that. ...Would you?