The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (47 page)

It was the first Saturday in December, almost the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, when the mailman knocked on our door because the chubby packet of V-mail letters he had for us wouldn't fit into our mailbox. Ben was indeed in North Africa. He had written every day while he waited in communicative quarantine to sail from England with the invasion force, and twice a day during the long, slow, dull, but tense voyage as his convoy skirted the Iberian peninsula, rendezvous'd with the convoy originating in the United States, passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, then lay at anchor off the coast of Algeria. All these letters had been found in his kit and returned to him in the hospital after he was wounded during the landing at Oran. To this bundle of letters he had added another, scribbling on the outside of its envelope 'read this first'. This note told her that he was recovering from a flesh wound in his side (wounded by a French bullet, he underlined bitterly) but he was being well taken care of. In fact, he was at that moment sitting in the forecourt of a French resort hotel that had been converted into a field hospital overlooking the sparkling Mediterranean. Oh... by the way... he was officially a hero, having received a Purple Heart. Oh, and another thing. Mother would have to change the way she addressed his letters, now that he had made staff sergeant. He ended by saying that considering his lofty rank and his status as a hero, he expected one hell-of-a-lot of respect when he got home, and maybe even a little obedience... just kidding. Ha-ha!

We were all relieved that Ben was all right, but from that time on Mother seemed to flinch inside whenever someone knocked at our door, as though she were expecting bad news. Ben's long silence, then his wound had put an end to her feeling that their future out West was certain and inevitable.

Sometimes at night, when Anne-Marie was asleep and I was reading, Mother would come in and sit on the edge of my daybed and ask what my book was about, or what I was studying in school, and I knew she was down in the dumps and needed company, so I would suggest a late-night game of honeymoon pinochle, which was really what she had come in for. She always protested that I needed my sleep, what with having to get up early in the morning to start the boiler and do my paper round, and she would only agree to a game when I insisted that I was feeling tense and maybe a game or two would help me get to sleep. We would go into the kitchen which we could warm up by lighting one of the gas burners. She would make hot chocolate if we had the milk, and we would play at the kitchen table. I must have inherited some of my blood father's card-playing genes because I had long ago become much better at pinochle than she, but I contrived to let her win most of the time. I would absent-mindedly fail to meld part of what I had, or I would weaken my playing hand by sloughing the highest card I could without winning the trick. I was afraid that she might catch me letting her win, but she was always too exhilarated by her narrow victories to notice, especially when, after over-bidding, she managed to save herself by taking good fat tricks towards the end of the hand, snapping her winning cards down on mine with gusto. Because she took such pleasure in winning, I didn't mind losing, but it always seemed that as soon as I decided to lose, the ironic Gods of Chance would send me the greatest hands of my life, so it was not only a crying shame to lose, but difficult too.

Playing cards was not our only home entertainment. There was also the radio, and endless games of 'twenty questions', and at night as we did the supper dishes, Anne-Marie and I would challenge each other to 'Name That Tune'. One of us would hum or whistle a couple bars and the other had to guess the song. Anne-Marie knew more popular music than I did, but my memory for lyrics was infallible. I knew the words to all the hits of the 1941-42 season.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note59#note59” ??[59]?

Another game we played was called One Hundred Dollars! (Anne-Marie and I agreed that the exclamation mark was part of the name). Each of us was allotted a fictional hundred dollars to spend on anything in the Montgomery Ward catalogue. We each had a strip of brown bag paper and a pencil to make our list, and at the end we voted on who had made the best buys. (Anyone who had more than two dollars left over automatically lost.) Anne-Marie usually bought clothes for herself together with bits of fringe and ruffle and ribbon to personalize the generic styles, but she always remembered to get at least one present for Mother and one for me, which was something neither Mother nor I ever thought of. Mother bought things for the house, mostly sensible, but occasionally decorative, like three wrought-iron fish in diminishing sizes that she could hang on the tiled wall of our future bathroom in Wyoming to give it 'that decorator touch'. I usually bought things I thought I might be able to make money with: tools for use as a hired handyman, or paintbrushes, a ladder and white bib overalls with a white cap to equip myself as a freelance house painter.

While Anne-Marie and I compared lists, defending our choices while ridiculing the other person's, my mother would mend our socks and clothes using the wooden egg with a screw-in handle. That old hickory egg was the only memento she had of her mother. Some of her darning was so extensive that it amounted to re-weaving, just to make worn-through knickerbockers last another month or two. I had seen a war movie at the Grand in which Germans tossed 'potato masher' hand grenades at French partisans, and it occurred to me that my mother's darning egg would make a perfect German hand grenade, so the next day I snuck (that was the past participle in Pearl Street usage) it from her sewing box and hurled it with devastating effect at nests of Nazis from one end of our back alley to the other. But the darning egg got dented and scuffed up (war is not without its costs) and I didn't dare return it to her sewing box before I had scraped up enough money to buy some sandpaper to remove the scars of combat and some varnish to return it to as good as new. In the meantime, I continued to use the darning egg in its martial capacity. One afternoon as I was walking past a parked dump truck, my imagination suddenly sparked and I flattened myself against the brick wall, lobbed my hand grenade into the back of the tank the duplicitous Nazis had camouflaged as a dump truck, then threw myself on the pavement to avoid the shrapnel, and while I was lying there with my arms over my head, the goddamned tank drove off! Taking my mother's darning egg with it.

That very night—wouldn't you know it?—she suggested that we play One Hundred Dollars! while she did her darning. I was unable to deflect her to pinochle, so I sat there, drawing up my list with a frown of total concentration as she pawed around in the bottom of her sewing basket with growing irritation, muttering that she couldn't seem to find her darning egg. “H'm,” I hummed, with a 'How-about-that?' inflection. She asked if I had seen it. Asked me. Not Anne-Marie, no, only me. As though everything was always my fault. I didn't lie to her. I almost never lied to my mother, but I was adept at the misleading non-lie. When she asked if I had done something with her darning egg I said, “Me?” (Just a matter of clarification, not a lie.) Then I sighed, put my list of purchases aside, and said, “All right, all right, I'll help you find it!” And I went around the house, looking under beds and in drawers, from which actions my mother may perhaps have drawn the conclusion that I hadn't taken it, but I never actually lied to her. Indeed, I gave her reason to be proud of my ingenuity when I unscrewed the lightbulb from a lamp and told her to try using that until her darning egg showed up. It worked perfectly, and for the rest of her life, my mother darned with a burnt-out lightbulb, although she would occasionally raise her eyes from her work and wonder what on earth ever became of her mother's hickory darning egg.

That June, a few days after the school year staggered to its dreary end, I became thirteen years old. A teenager? Me, who had always scorned the mooning, mawkish ways of teenagers like radio's chicken-voiced Henry Aldrich? Me, a teenager! But wait, I didn't want to be a teenager. I wasn't through being a kid, yet.

Later that summer, the Allies landed in Sicily, and we all worried about Ben when, once again, the flow of his letters stopped for nearly three weeks. Then we got a V-mail from a hospital in Palermo. The letter was short, and Ben's handwriting was shaky, but he made a joke about how he seemed always to be standing just where some bullet hankered to be. For all the jocular tone, Mother felt sure that this new wound was more serious than the one he got in North Africa, and she was tense and edgy for a couple of weeks, until she received a letter in which Ben said he was out of the hospital and loafing around in a recuperation center. Oh, and he'd received his second Purple Heart, along with an increase in rank to technical sergeant. “If this war goes on long enough, I'll end up a general!” Mother talked about changing the service banner in our window from a blue star to a silver one in recognition of Ben's wounds, but she never got around to it. At the time I thought her indifference had something to do with a long letter that came a few days later in which Ben confessed that he was no longer a technical sergeant. He had been broken back to private. Along with some buddies at the recuperation center, he had gone into town to celebrate with a couple of beers... only a couple, honest... but the next day he passed a lieutenant without saluting, and when the newly commissioned shavetail rebuked him, Ben unleashed a spate of abuse and rage that he didn't realize had built up within him. Mother had been proud of the way Ben had risen so quickly through the ranks and she was vexed to have to write 'Private' on her V-mail letters.

Ben's loss of rank didn't matter a bit to me, but I sensed ominous potential in his strange, self-destructive kind of alcoholism.

My mother and I were playing honeymoon pinochle at the kitchen table. She and Anne-Marie had gone to bed a couple of hours earlier, and I was reading in my daybed when she came padding in and asked if I was ready to face the licking I had coming to me for winning our last game... by pure, blind luck! Our habitual challenge routine involved this sort of lippy banter, but I could hardly tell her that I'd rather stay in my cozy bed with my book because I felt she wanted to get something off her chest. “Any time you feel lucky, Mother o' mine,” I said, climbing out of bed and draping the Hudson Bay over my shoulders. “But I warn you that you're in for another humiliation.”

“That'll be a hot day in hell,” she said.

I sighed, but let it go.

Partway through the first hand, she mentioned offhandedly that her divorce had come through.

“Really? When?”

“A couple of weeks ago.”

“A couple of weeks? But... why didn't you say something?”

She shrugged. No other answer.

“Well anyway,” I said, “that's great news!” For the past six months, I had been haunted by fantasies of coming home after school and finding my father sitting at the kitchen table, swigging down green soda and smiling slyly because he knew that we wouldn't be able to divorce him for abandoning us... not for another seven years at least. I considered killing him and hiding the body somewhere. How to hide him was an engrossing problem, and I occupied some of the boring time in class working up inventive solutions, like drying him out like a mummy then dressing him in Indian clothes and putting him in the glass-case diorama of Iroquois life in the Natural History Museum. “So, you and Ben are free to get married whenever you like.”

“Except that he's on the other side of the ocean, fighting this damned war.”

My trouble-hunting imagination instantly shifted from my father showing up to ruin the divorce to the possibility that Ben might not come back, having been killed in battle, or become infatuated with some foreign woman, or hit on the head by a falling roof tile and wandering around Europe, a victim of the amnesia: a plot gimmick that was making the rounds of the soap operas at that time.

I was counting up points when she spoke as though giving voice to a thought she had begun in silence, “...it gave me a funny feeling, seeing that word written down in black and white: 'Desertion'. That's what it said under 'plaintiff's grounds for seeking divorce'. Desertion seems such a... I don't know... such a cruel way to say it. I mean, Ray didn't really 'desert' us.”

“Oh no? What would you call it?”

“Well, he... I don't know. He can't stay put. It just isn't in his nature.”

“H'm.”

“I somehow can't get used to the idea that I'm a divorced woman. I can't believe I'm no longer married to your father. He was the first man I ever...” She shrugged and shook her head.

The game wasn't over, but I didn't shuffle because she obviously wasn't interested in playing.

“All the time I was waiting for the divorce to become final... all those months... I had this funny feeling that any minute Ray would open the door and toss his hat in like he used to do. He'd wait to see if I was going to throw his hat back at him, and if it didn't come sailing back out, he'd come in with that crooked grin of his and... He was a charmer, your father. Oh, sure, he's no good and irresponsible and all that, but he was a charmer. You've got to give him that. And a woman was proud to be seen on his arm. Great dresser. Smooth talker.”

“He's a con man, Mom.”

“He never thought of himself as a con man.”

“What did he think he was?”

“A dream-merchant.” She smiled to herself and repeated, “That's what he told me one night. A dream-merchant. He didn't con people, he sold them dreams.” She compressed her lips and shook her head. “I guess there's no love like your first love.”