The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (44 page)

Despite the tea service fiasco and my spat with Mother, the memory of the four of us sitting in the front room, Mother and Ben in the squeaking rattan chairs that had come with the apartment, Anne-Marie and I sprawled at opposite ends of my daybed, singing together softly in the dim blue-and-white light, remains for me after more than sixty years an iconographic image of Christmas, a moment rendered poignant by the unspoken knowledge that Ben and so many men and boys from our block were going off into danger, and might not come back. In fact, several didn't.

We all went down to Union Station to see Ben off to Fort Dix. Impressed by the fact that Ben was studying radio design on his own and was proficient at Morse code, and by the high scores he had made on the basic tests, the enlistment officer had designated him for the Signal Corps, where Ben hoped to learn things he could use to get a better job when the war was over. He regretted that he and Mother had to wait two years before they could marry, because if they were married Mother would be entitled to widow's benefits if something happened to him. But he wanted to take care of us as best he could, so he had brought Mother downtown and set up a joint bank account into which he intended to send a portion of his pay in the form of what were called 'allotment checks'. He told Mother to use some of this money to continue Anne-Marie's dancing lessons, but the bulk was to be saved as a nest egg to start the Double-R-Bar Tourist Cabins in Wyoming just as soon as this war was over, which would surely be by next Christmas because how long could a ranting maniac with a Charlie Chaplin mustache and a bunch of near-sighted Japs hold out against an aroused America?

We had all dressed up in our finest to see him off, and we had cups of hot chocolate in the crowded station cafeteria while we waited for his name to be called over the loudspeaker... the first time we had eaten out since our arrival in Albany. And the last time too, Mother declared, at these prices! Ben found their song, the 1940 hit 'Only Forever', on the jukebox. He put in a nickel to play it, and Mother squeezed his hand under the table. Silent tears filled Anne-Marie's eyes. We stood on the platform in a dense pack of friends, family and lovers, all of us waving good-bye as the train pulled out with hissing jets of steam that billowed up into the platform lights. Men hung out train windows, waving as the train slipped into the dark tunnel, the edge of its shadow chopping off one waving soldier after another. Then the three of us walked back to North Pearl Street through a fresh snow that covered the sooty slush, making everything look clean and beautiful.

That night I sat up for a time, working out problems with the slide rule Ben had taught me to use, then I lifted my eyes from my work and numbly watched the street through a muffling curtain of snow. Everything was so quiet and still. The three of us were alone again... just as though Ben had never come into our lives. And suddenly I got a scary idea: what if there never had been a Ben, with his plans to take care of Mother for the rest of her life? What if I had made him up, like I made up so many characters for my story games? Made him up because I so much wanted someone to relieve me of responsibility for her future. How could I find out without the risk of everybody finding out that I had gone crazy? If I asked about him tomorrow and he didn't exist, they'd all know I was a nutter. No, I'd just have to wait for someone to mention his name... then I'd be safe. Am I crazy? I don't feel crazy. But then, crazy people don't feel crazy... because they're crazy!

But the next morning, Mother announced that she had decided not to touch a penny of Ben's allotment money. “Not a penny! When he comes back, I want to see the surprise on his face when he sees how much we've saved up for Wyoming!”

Yeah, I thought to myself, that's a great idea, but what about Anne-Marie's dancing lessons? Prices for everything had jumped up a notch as soon as war was declared, but our welfare income had remained the same. And we had come to depend on the extra dollars Ben gave us for his meals. It was obvious that we would need an additional source of money, and it was equally evident that it was up to me to find it. But where?

Frankly, I was beginning to tire of hearing about that 'place in Wyoming', tired of pinning our hopes on so flimsy a fantasy. I felt that hope was a dangerous thing because it made you vulnerable to disappointment. Ben had made Mother's nose wrinkle with an earthy adage describing those who waste their time hoping and dreaming: 'Like the fella said: Hope in one hand and shit in the other, and see which fills up first'.

In the end, through the good offices of Mr Kane I got a second paper route to pay for Anne-Marie's tap lessons without touching Ben's allotment money. A newspaper broker used to bring Mr Kane a handful of Sunday papers for his customers, and one Sunday he mentioned that he was looking for a kid from the neighborhood to deliver papers, and Mr Kane recommended me. So now I had two paper routes, one for the Times-Union and another for the Knickerbocker News. Technically, I was still under the legal age to have a paper route, and it was against the rules for the same kid to deliver the two rival papers, but this broker, a slimy Dickensian gnome with mossy teeth and a taste for boys, routinely hired kids too young to have paper routes legally, reasoning that they wouldn't dare complain when he cheated them. But he was having trouble finding anyone to take a route in our neighborhood, where people who could afford a daily paper were so few and far between that seventy-five papers, the average for a five-block route, covered a twelve-block area. This meant that the kid had to walk more than twice as far and climb twice as many staircases to deliver the standard number of papers. Another thing that made my neighborhood unpopular with paperboys was the great number of deadbeats, some just because they were cheap, but most because they were poor. This made collecting hard and sometimes perilous, because frustration and shame could turn a drunken man into a bully when he was asked to cough up a quarter for his week's five papers.

Between the two paper routes, I carried a daily average of a hundred and fifty papers, which obliged me to start an hour earlier than the other newsies and to make two trips up to the brokers' because I couldn't carry a hundred fifty papers at one go. This and the exceptional length of my route meant that now I had to respond to our sadistic alarm clock at four-thirty every weekday morning in order to get to school on time. And four-thirty was suddenly earlier and darker and colder when, in February of 1942, all clocks in the United States went one hour ahead of standard time to save on fuel by reducing the need for lighting in the evenings. This 'Standard War Time' (in summer we changed to double daylight savings time) continued until September of 1945. So those were war time years in the literal sense.

Mother did everything she could to help me. Except when her lungs betrayed her, she never failed to get up and make my breakfast and, on rainy or snowy mornings, to make sure I wore my galoshes and was muffled up to the ears. And she always said, 'God bless you, son' when I left to go out into the dark and the cold. Which is a little odd, considering how she felt about God.

The newspaper business in the Albany of my day did not favor the newsie, who paid his broker four cents per paper and charged his customers five, so in theory he made a penny for every paper he delivered. For me, that would have been about a buck fifty a day, or seven fifty a week, more than we got from welfare and enough to pay for Anne-Marie's tap lessons and still save some for big emergencies or little pleasures. But the paperboy paid for his papers in advance, so when a customer stiffed him, it wasn't just his penny profit that the kid lost, it was also the four cents he'd paid for each paper. One deadbeat running behind for several weeks before either dropping his subscription or being cut off by the paperboy would reduce your takings by twenty-five cents a week. Because so many of the people on my paper routes were either poor or stingy, I never had fewer than a dozen deadbeats in any given week, and this cut my seven and a half dollars in half. While most of the customers eventually paid up to keep me from cutting them off, a fair percentage of them were old hands at the scam of quitting their subscription, then starting a new one the next day, and the paperboy was obliged by the circulation office to accept this 'new' customer. And why not? After all, the newspaper company wasn't losing any money, and the broker was still getting his four cents per paper. Only the newsie was out of pocket.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note49#note49” ??[49]?

I did well to make three fifty a week from eighteen hours of predawn delivering in all weathers, and an additional tense four or five hours each Saturday, when I went around the route making my collections. I could have made a little more if I had been quick to cut my losses before the deadbeats got very far behind, but both crippling compassion and crippling hope kept me from cutting them off as soon as they stopped paying. An instance of crippling compassion would be the old people for whom the arrival of their paper was the only incident in a lonely day, and their only contact with the world beyond their door. An example of crippling hope would be when a customer already owed me for a month, and I knew that once I dropped him that money was lost forever, so I would con myself into believing that maybe, just maybe, he might pay up and I'd have an extra dollar and a quarter to drop into the Dream Bank. This hope caused me to extend his credit for one more week... then one more week... then just one more... until finally he'd move away or drop his subscription and leave me flat. The other situation that trapped me into compassionate losses was when the woman (it was usually the woman with a crying, squirming baby that you had to deal with, while the husband kept out of sight) wept when you threatened to stop delivering the paper, saying that her husband needed the want ads to look for work. What would they do if they didn't have a paper? I swear that word of my vulnerability on this ground must have spread among my customers, because I heard that tale so often. I knew, of course, that it was true in only a few cases. But which ones?

Mrs Hanrahan, who lived in my own building, was typical of the bad customer. She complained that her papers came late, or weren't delivered at all, or were dirty, or had already been opened and read by some phantom paper-snooper, and on these grounds she would refuse to pay her bill. I twice cut her from my list, but both times she immediately subscribed again, and I was obliged to deliver to her, even though she never, never, never paid up. And if I simply refused to drop off her paper, she would be served by one of the paper broker's 'favorites' and I would be charged ten cents for each paper.

If I came down with a bad cold and couldn't do my route, the broker would send out one of his pets to cover it, and I would have to pay that kid ten cents a paper, no matter how much or little I collected that week; so my Mother used to bundle up and deliver my papers for me, taking twice as long as I did because she didn't know the route, and costing us money on complaints for late papers, but at least we didn't lose the paper route. There were two occasions when both of us were ill at the same time, me having caught her cold while caring for her, and this brought us to the edge of financial disaster, but still Mother steadfastly refused to touch Ben's allotment savings.

The purchasing power of our weekly $7.27 continued to dwindle because OPA price freezes slowed, but could not prevent, wartime inflation. And yet Mother stuck pugnaciously to her decision to save Ben's allotments for their tourist cabins. The only money she would draw from their joint account was to pay for her divorce, which came through early in 1943. She reasoned that the divorce was as much for Ben as it was for her.

For the first two months after Ben enlisted Mother got regular letters which she read to herself with a soft, elsewhere look in her eyes that was strangely, but pleasantly, inconsistent with the cocky, flash-tempered mixed-blood I knew. When Ben came back on a three-day embarkation pass, Anne-Marie and I were proud to be seen with him in his uniform with two stripes on his sleeve. With his knowledge of radio, he had scored the highest of his radio class and was made corporal almost immediately. I still have a photograph of the three of us together, the slightly overexposed streetscape of Pearl Street's stoops receding diagonally behind us. I remember Mother taking this snapshot with her old billows Kodak, looking down into the viewer and moving back and forth to get the composition right. The embarkation leave was quickly over and we saw Ben off on his train. There followed a silence of several weeks that had us all worried until, one morning, we received a bundle of V-mail letters with words and addresses inked out. It seemed remarkable to me that Ben (a sergeant already) was in England, the England of Robin Hood and Sherlock Holmes, the place Edward R. Murrow's voice came from, the frying crackle of short-wave lending realism and immediacy to his savory baritone descriptions of the blitz he was watching from a rooftop, bombs and ack-ack fire audible in the background.

Nightly news broadcasts brought the nation to a standstill. Energetic children slowed to a hushed tip-toe at exactly six o'clock when their families clustered around radios to learn how the war was going; men in barbershops stopped wisecracking and frowned importantly at the radio in solemn silence; women decorating church basements stepped down from their ladders and listened, strands of crepe paper dangling from senseless fingers, everyone tense and vulnerable lest they hear something dreadful. After the newscasts came commentaries by men whose voices had become identified with the truth and with sympathetic concern: the didactic H. V. Kaltenborn;? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note50#note50” ??[50]? the atonic, unflappable Elmer Davis; the quaintly named Raymond Gram Swing; the plummy elocutionist, Lowell Thomas; the jabbering scandal-huckster, Walter Winchell; and the lugubrious doom-herald, Gabriel Heatter. But the most widely admired was Edward R. Murrow, who in later years would confirm his reputation as the nation's most trusted journalist with his public demolition of that rabble-rousing national embarrassment, Senator Joseph McCarthy.