The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (49 page)

Mother and Ben's bank account grew with his monthly allotment checks and its accruing interest, and I sometimes found myself half-believing in their tourist cabins out in Wyoming when the war was over. I accompanied Mother to the bank when she had to sign something, and for the first time I experienced the cool marble, dark wood, and glistening brass of a temple of capitalism. It would be more than twenty years before I found myself in a bank again. Most people from North Pearl Street, or any other slum in America, went through their entire lives without ever seeing the inside of a bank, just as they never learned to drive or went on vacation. Banks, automobiles, holidays, these were for rich people.

After being sent back to England to recover from his second wound, Ben was assigned to instructing in a Signal Corps school, where he worked his way back up to sergeant. His letters never failed to ask how Anne-Marie was getting on with her dancing lessons, and if I was still the star pupil in school. Well, no, in fact. I had given up trying to excel in the classroom because there was no point in it. If things went wrong between Mother and Ben, I would have to get a job at sixteen anyway, so why bother?

Although I didn't do much schoolwork that year, I devoted a couple of hours each night and many Saturday afternoons to translating Poll de Carotte into English, one of those Herculean tasks that you accomplish because you don't know it's supposed to be impossible. I had found the book on a cart of foreign-language holdings, along with a French-English dictionary and a dog-eared first-year French grammar. I spent hours in my window niche above the sighing, gurgling radiator, working out baffling passages as though I were breaking enemy codes, and this appealed to the role-playing boy in me. Considering that I undertook this task with no preparation other than a careful study of the thirty-two-page “Introduction to French” in my High School Subjects Self-Taught, it is probably just as well that I didn't mind whole paragraphs remaining intriguingly ambiguous... a quality I ascribed to French literature in general.

“We interrupt this program to...”

It was June 6, 1944, and the Allies were landing on the beaches of Normandy. Mother couldn't sleep that night, sure that Ben was involved in the invasion, despite his repeated assurances that the wounds he had received in North Africa and Sicily would keep him in England and out of combat. We played honeymoon pinochle into the small hours, talking about the place in Wyoming and all the things we'd do when Ben came back. I made her laugh a couple of times by letting her win then pretending to be angry that she'd beaten me by just one or two tricks, but it wasn't until a week later when we received a V-mail letter from England postmarked later than D-Day that she really believed that Ben was safe. A weight was lifted from me, too. I wanted nothing more than for them to marry and be happy and together forever and ever, leaving me free to go do something on my own. Even after her divorce came through I could never quite rid myself of the fear that I might get home from school one of these days, and there my father would be, drinking lime soda and eating green cake, and Mother would be all aglow. She'd tell me that she had decided to give him one more chance, and they'd ask me to write Ben and explain. (You're so good at words, son.) Then, of course, Ray would run off again, and Mother would collapse into depression and bitterness, and I'd have to take care of her for the rest of her life. And mine.

The morning after the announcement of the Normandy landings, the front page of the newspaper had a map of the Cotentin peninsula with little American, British and Canadian flags indicating the assault beaches: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. I cut the map out and taped it on the wall beside our radio, so I could follow events as they were broadcast. Although the news reporters were confident in tone, there didn't seem to be much advance from the beachheads in those first days. We were not told of the terrible losses our troops took on Bloody Omaha beach, nor did we know how close they came to being thrown back into the sea.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note62#note62” ??[62]?

Summer passed and Labor Day came to signal the beginning of school; trees in Washington Park turned gold and red before their leaves fluttered down and were swept into deep crisp piles that kids weren't supposed to jump into and scatter, so of course they did, then ran like hell from the rickety-legged old man brandishing his rake; and pretty soon it was late autumn and the nights were cold, and brittle stars were close overhead when Mother, Anne-Marie and I walked home through dark streets after Dish Night at the Paramount Theater, where Humphrey Bogart had appeared in a special clip asking us—yes I'm talking to you, pal, sitting in that theater seat right now—to dig deep and subscribe to the Third War Bond Drive and help buy the guns and planes our boys need to beat the Japs and Nazis and come back home to the families they love. The lights were turned up, and ushers came down the aisles passing out pledge forms in which you wrote how much you would give. I was always embarrassed that we didn't have enough money to buy war stamps, much less the $18.75 needed to buy the cheapest war bond. But Mother took her pledge form with a friendly smile and put it into her handbag to be used later for keeping pinochle scores.

Through that long, war-weary winter of 1944-45, I taped up the newspaper maps that recorded our army's progress in Europe as I learned of it from nightly news broadcasts and the weekly movie news-reels. I drew and re-drew lines and blocks and curving arrows that described enemy emplacements and our troop movements as we liberated France. Meanwhile, we fought the Japanese in the Pacific where our young men died in amphibian island-hopping advances against an entrenched and stubborn enemy; but for my family the essential war was in Europe, where Ben was, and all our hopes for the future.

I finished Poll de Carotte and began Le Comte de Monte Cristo. Maybe I'd become a rich and famous translator, if only I could work out what this conditional tense was all about.

Victory in Europe

March winds moaned around street corners, making sooty dust swirls that stung the eyes and were gritty between the teeth. The unseasonably cold wind pushed me down the steep Livingston Avenue hill when I returned from school, my arms spread wide to create more sail surface to let the wind hustle me along rubber-knee'd and pleasantly helpless. The next morning before dawn, that same searching wind made climbing the hill doubly hard because I had to bend low to offer less surface to its force. Radio news commentators informed us in triumphant tones that American and British troops, having survived the harrowing Battle of the Bulge, were driving the Germans eastwards over the Rhine as the Russians pressed them westwards to Berlin. Could victory be far away?? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note63#note63” ??[63]?

My personal contribution to the war effort was a complex combat game I constructed from shards of those war movies in which actors like Errol Flynn and John Wayne single-handedly mowed down thousands of arrogant Nazis or sneaky Nips. This most athletic, most realistic, most demanding and most satisfying of all my story games was also to be the last one I would ever play.

On the first three Saturdays of that last March of the war I set my clattering alarm clock for four in the morning, dressed quietly, then slipped out of the house to walk through pre-dawn streets all the way up to Washington Park and the flat-topped artificial hill that looked down on its miniature lake and boathouse. As sunrise began to gild the topmost leaves of the park's trees, I would work my way up this steep-sided hill, slipping back on the dewy grass at every second step. When I reached the top the game began with orders coming in over my crackling walkie-talkie stick. (After you spoke, you had to say 'over' and rub the side of the stick with your thumb so the other guy could speak, and you had to make his voice sound metallic and put in some static, not an easy stick to run.) I was informed that my loyal followers and I must hold this hill long enough for a reinforcement column to come up and thwart the Germans' (or Japs') final offensive. I accepted the assignment gravely, knowing full well the terrible sacrifices it would entail. Then I gathered together my old band of followers and told them what was expected of us, my voice tight and bitter because we had been chosen yet again for the most dangerous mission of all. Why did we always get the dirty jobs? Why us? The likelihood of our coming through this one was slim, but my band was willing to follow me; yes, even to the deepest pits of hell!

I was examining the lay of the land through my telescope stick when I suddenly realized that we were completely surrounded by machine-gun emplacements whose fire was sweeping our flat hilltop from all directions at once. Through this withering fire, I dashed from one side of the hill to the other, shooting clip after blazing clip down on the enemy with my rapid-fire stick while shouting orders and encouragements to my band. One by one, my followers got hit. Gail died with her head on my knee, looking up at me with a faint smile of admiration. I kept up a continual report of our plight to headquarters over my walkie-talkie stick, a task requiring considerable vocal acrobatics because I was also doing all the dialogue for half a dozen heroes and making the sound effects of the incoming fire that ricocheted just inches from my head. Running crouched down so that my knees almost hit my chin (and once they did, making me bite my tongue... damn it!) I got to the other side of the hill just as Reggie got it. He died with a typically British stiff-upper-lip joke, the punch line of which he was unable to say before he passed away, so I said it for him. The last of my devoted followers to die was always Tonto. There were no theatrical last words between us two Indian blood brothers. No tears. No outward demonstrations of emotion. He just nodded a last farewell, and I nodded back, and he died. Snatching up my machine-gun stick, I rushed from one side of the hill to the other, mowing down columns of ascending Germans (or Japs) until I could see the allied reinforcements slipping into place around the boathouse. The day was saved! Democracy had vanquished Totalitarianism, showing that free men fighting for what they believe in were invincible, because they—

But just then a bullet got me in the stomach, and another in the shoulder, and one in the back, and a fourth in the hip. I spun, pitched, staggered, limped, crawled to the edge of the steep hill and fell, tumbling and bouncing all the way down, collecting painful knocks, twists, bruises and scuffs along the way.

I lay unmoving at the bottom of the hill, my legs and arms splayed at unlikely angles indicating broken bones and torn ligaments. After a long time, I stirred and opened my eyes, then I slowly rose, first to my knees, then, with desperate effort and after collapsing a couple of times, to my feet. Then I staggered and slogged my way back up the steep hillside several times each morning so that this spectacular fall could be repeated, like an action re-play, and only when I was satisfied that I had drained the last drop of heroic bathos out of it, did I limp out of Washington Park, past the first early-morning pedestrians, and take the long walk home to clean up my scuffed knees, change my torn clothing, and set off on my Saturday collection round, which I accomplished with the fatalistic gravity of a boy who has been prematurely aged by seeing his closest friends die beside him.

Three Saturdays in a row, I saved Democracy at the top of the Washington Park hill. After the third heroic battle my hips were stiff with accumulated bruises, I had scrapes on my knees and cheek, and I had wrenched an ankle in the final great rolling, bouncing plunge of my bullet-riddled body down the almost vertical flank of that hill and lay at the bottom, the twisted remnants of an unknown hero. Only a handful of early walkers were in the park that last Saturday when I stopped beside the four-man gondola swing and looked back at the hill and the boathouse below it. As I stood there, I felt a tug of bittersweet sadness and my eyes misted as I realized that I would never, never play a story game again. Those inventive, precious, nonsensical moments of escape and adventure were behind me.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note64#note64” ??[64]?

As a symbol of my passage from fun-seeking boyhood to responsible manhood, I left the stick that had served as a telescope/machine gun/walkie-talkie/plasma holder against one stanchion of the big wooden swing, and I walked quickly away, down the path, through the gate, to a side street leading to home and responsibilities.

About three blocks from Clinton Avenue, I stopped, turned and ran back up the street, through the gates, across the grass to the swing where, thank God, I found that my all-purpose stick had not been nicked by some kid to play his dumb games with. I carried it back home with me... just in case.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note65#note65” ??[65]?

I do not claim that my epic defense of the flat-topped hill in Washington Park was a determining factor in the fall of the Third Reich, but could it really be mere coincidence that on May 7, only a couple of months after I limped away from the last of my early-morning battles, Germany surrendered and the war in Europe was over?

I hawked EXTRA-A-A's, from one corner of Pearl and State streets while other newsies worked the other three corners.

GERMANY SURRENDERS!