The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (54 page)

Our Ship Comes In

I watched Albany slip backwards out of our lives as our train pulled away from Union Station on August 3, 1945. We were the only civilians in a car so overcrowded that some of the passengers, mostly soldiers reporting back to duty after leaves, had to squat in the aisles. Two young soldiers got up to give Mother and Anne-Marie their seats. Another offered his place to me, but although I was still wobbly from my illness, I was as tall as he, so I felt obliged to say no, thanks, and I perched on Mother's armrest all the way to Buffalo where, during the bustle of passengers getting off and on, I slipped into the vacated window seat facing my sister.

Earlier that morning Mother and Anne-Marie had stood out on the curb among our boxes and suitcases, awaiting a taxi to take us to the station, while I went back into our apartment for a last look around to make sure we had left nothing behind that we didn't mean to leave behind. In the deep silence of the no-longer-alive apartment I was aware of a soft drip, drip, drip from the cold-water tap. I went into the kitchen and tried to turn it off, but I couldn't, and I wondered if it had been dripping, unremarked, ever since we arrived that March afternoon eight and a half years earlier. While I had remained in bed until the last minute to conserve my energy for the trip, Mother and Anne-Marie had worked since dawn, determined to leave the apartment spotless... another proof that we weren't of the Pearl Street culture. They had left the door of the icebox open so that loathsome icebox smell wouldn't accumulate. Upon leaving, my mother had passed a wax mop over the linoleum floors. The wax hadn't dried completely in the front room, so my rubber soles made slight ripping sounds as I stepped over to my daybed and looked out the window for the last time. The two over-sized wicker chairs stood where they had always stood, in the way and all but useless. A new family would be moving in within the week, and the broken canes would snatch at their clothing as they had snatched at ours for eight years. How many families would sit in those slumping, squeaking chairs before they finally found their way to a dump somewhere? I was touching one of them in farewell when the taxi drew up outside. Snatching my hand away in my haste to start on our adventure, I got a sliver of rattan under my fingernail. Those goddamned chairs got a final shot at me.

As the cab pulled away, I saw Mr Kane standing in the doorway of his cornerstore. He lifted a palm to me in farewell and blessing. I lifted my hand to him.

I owed him more than that. I promised myself I would stay in contact with him. We would exchange letters, so he'd have someone to share his quirky brand of 'enterprise socialism' with, and I'd have the advice of a wise old man.

I never wrote to him.

Because Ben wasn't an officer we had to travel in enlisted men's transportation, which meant that we crossed the United States in worn-out chair cars with no berths to stretch out in at night. What had been a three-day trip in peacetime took us six and a half days because of wartime congestion and because over the preceding twenty years the rolling stock and track had been allowed to run down by the asset-stripping descendants of nineteenth-century robber barons. Our train included four sleeping cars and a dining car, but these were reserved for officers and their dependents who were protected from degrading contact with the lower orders by MPs stationed at the door of the first sleeping car. From the conductor, we learned that these modern, comfortable cars were less than half full, while our car and all those behind us were so crowded that men slept in the vestibules, where they sat on the floor beside rattling toilet doors, bracing themselves against their duffel bags to catch a little sleep as the car jolted and swayed through the night: a further example of unjust privilege to kindle a budding young socialist.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note68#note68” ??[68]?

The crowded conditions produced that wartime atmosphere of make-do cheerfulness. As the train followed the tow path of the Barge Canal towards Buffalo, soldiers sang and laughed and exchanged jokes and swigs from pocket flasks, while those lucky enough to have seats played cards on blankets stretched over their knees, or caught snatches of sweaty, uneasy sleep. There was always a line of urgent men at the door of the only toilet that was functioning, and it was sometimes necessary to use the vestibule window they had wrenched open for the purpose.

At Chicago we made a chaotic cross-city change from the New York Central to the Union Pacific, an embarrassing business because our luggage was a mix of cheap cardboard suitcases, string-tied boxes, and soft things knotted up in old sheets, real Route 66 stuff. A predatory taxi driver counted each of our boxes and bundles as a piece of luggage, putting an unexpected dent in the fifty dollars in small bills that my mother carried for the trip. But she made the driver stop at a little grocery store where she bought four loaves of bread, a large jar of peanut butter, a couple of pounds of assorted cold cuts, and two bottles of milk. This turned out to be a wise precaution because there was no dining car in our next train; the railroad company didn't make enough profit from soldiers' meal tickets. From Chicago on, a small group of homesick soldiers clustered around us, forming an ad hoc family of which Anne-Marie was the hub and the star. She sang hit songs for the soldiers to the accompaniment of a guitar and a mouth organ. A monkey-faced corporal who used to be a drummer in a swing band provided the beat using two pencils as drumsticks. His drum set consisted of the arm of his seat, the bottom of an empty Whitman's Sampler box and the train window, and he produced cymbal rubs by miming the action while making a tchshshsh sound through his teeth. Anne-Marie even managed a few simple tap routines in the narrow, lurching aisle.

I had always been disinclined to celebrate openly, lest malevolent Fate decide to teach me a lesson, but I let myself savor a thrill of optimism about our future. Maybe I thought we were too hard a target for Fate to draw a bead on, racing as we were across the continent on glistening steel rails. I was wrong.

The soldiers didn't buy the expensive sandwiches that were hawked down the aisles twice each day because most of them had blown their money on leave, and even those who hadn't were reluctant to eat in front of hungry buddies. They would look out the windows with feigned interest in the passing scene while we ate our sandwiches, but the smell of peanut butter and cold cuts made them swallow their saliva. When I noticed this, I could no longer eat; so after carefully counting up what remained of our fifty dollars and deciding that we could make it to California (just), Mother insisted that each of the soldiers of our little 'family' accept a sandwich every time we ate. They demurred, saying they weren't hungry, but Mother said 'don't try to give that crap to a Mother!' and they capitulated. Our little larder soon ran out, so each time we stopped long enough, I would rush out and buy sandwiches for everyone at the station lunch counter, where they cost half as much as the skimpy, dried-out sandwiches the railroad company hawkers sold. The danger of missing the train added zest to the game. One sullen young man who hovered on the edge of our nonce family refused to 'take food out of the mouths of kids'. When Mother pressed him too much, he slapped the sandwich out of her hand and the soldier sitting next to him drew back to smack him, but Mother shook her head, and he let it go. The sulky young man was the only sailor in our car, but the soldiers didn't taunt him on this account because he had received a nasty face wound, and they had found out during the first night's drinking in the vestibule that his girlfriend had ended their engagement with a Dear John letter, not because she wanted to, she had explained, but for his own good... in the long run. This brooding young sailor managed to sustain himself across the country on a box of Horlick's Malted Milk Tablets. Sometimes late at night when he thought everyone was asleep, he wept silently, save for a slight squeaking sound as he swallowed back his tears.

I jumped off at a two-hour layover to get some bread and peanut butter at a little store near the station. On the way back I bought a newspaper from the counter of the railroad canteen. The soldiers crowded around to read the headlines over my shoulder. One of our B-29s had dropped an 'atomic bomb' on Japan, demolishing a city called Hiroshima. There were whistles of wonder and triumphant yelps as the paper was passed down the car. We didn't learn until after the war that the number of civilians killed immediately was something like 70,000, more than the total death toll of all the air raids on England. Within the next six months, fifteen thousand of those suffering from unspeakable burns would also die, and the toll would continue to mount for many decades, as radiation worked its cancerous way through those damaged in the blast and through the bodies of children still unborn.

Our soldiers talked late into the night about the important things, or the wacky ones, they intended to do as soon as they got home, now that the war must be almost over. The sailor with the slippery-looking scars on his forehead and one cheek just looked out the window at the darkness.

Boredom alternated with helpless rage during the delays we spent in dusty sidings under the stifling sun. We were sitting on a shunt line, waiting for the overdue eastbound to pass us, when there was a buzz of excitement at the far end of our car, and a tipsy conductor came wading through the tangle of men sprawled in the vestibule, announcing that we had dropped a second atomic bomb, this one on Nagasaki. Americans would eventually learn that this bomb was more powerful than Hiroshima's, but Nagasaki's terrain and its smaller population lessened the extent of destruction and slaughter. Only 40,000 people were killed outright and a further 25,000 injured, many of whom would later die of radiation poisoning, and only about forty percent of the buildings were destroyed or damaged so badly they had to be pulled down. A relatively merciful bomb, really.

I had never heard of Hiroshima before the news of its bombing, but I had read about Nagasaki in the “Music Appreciation” part of High School Subjects Self-Taught. Puccini's Madame Butterfly had lived in beautiful Nagasaki.

It was after midnight. In the dim glow of the blue nightlights, everyone slept, uncomfortable and unattractive, mouths open, heads and feet counter-lurching with each lurch of the car. From within the narcotic clickety-click of the wheels and the groans of an old train on badly maintained track, a phantom orchestration of 'In the Mood' emerged, only to recede each time my ear sought it out. My long illness was still recent enough that I felt as though my skin didn't quite fit... as though I were slightly elsewhere and otherwise. Slipping in and out of shallow sleep, I half-awoke each time we passed through a town. Perhaps it was the reduction to yard speed that woke me. One time I opened my eyes and was sleepily confused to find the car quiet and still. We were standing in a siding, and out in the oceanic darkness of the plains there was a lone house with a single lit window. I focused back from the house to the blue ghostly image of my face on the train window, and I wondered about this house standing alone in an empty vastness.... One lit window. A lonely birth? A last illness? Love-making? Someone too excited to sleep as they plan a new life? Someone too worried to sleep because a son overseas has not written for weeks? A kid tearfully packing up a few treasured things before running away from home?

With a bump and a metallic groan, we moved out of the sidetrack and I dozed again, slipping down through the sound of the wheels clicking over track, down through the distinct yet fugitive threads of 'In the Mood', down to an underlying rhythm of peh-ta-kleet... peh-ta-kleet... peh-ta-kleet that coiled back on itself and became Pearl-a-Street... Pearl-a-Street... Pearl-a-Street, and I knew I would never again walk in the back alley where I had fought rustlers, sneering Nazis, perfidious Arabs and Cardinal Richelieu's swaggering henchmen, never again know an anguish of choice before Mr Kane's penny candies in glass jars, or walk past the storefront churches of Blacktown and hear preachers suffused with the Holy Ghost rasping and gasping out salvation, or look up at the flag in the corner of the classroom at PS. 5 and drone andtotherepublicforwhichitstands; never again pull my sister's wagon back from the surplus food warehouse, bringing home the ingredients for our safety-net potato soup; never again kneel beside the altar at early mass, or hold the paten beneath the wafer, worrying lest the body of Christ fail to make its precarious passage from Father Looney's trembling hands into the demurely opened mouths of the sisters with Parkinson's disease... mouths open like the sleepers around me in the dim blue light of the train, with its peh-ta-kleet... peh-ta-kleet... peh-ta-kleet, and I was rushing westward, away from Mrs McGivney's sugar cookies and her husband's fine white hair suffused with sunlight as his pale eyes stared into nothingness; leaving behind the bragging hotshots who loitered in the mouth of the alley, waiting for compliant Brigid Meehan... she of the dangerous brother with a milky eye, and the mother who could not let go of things... she of the long, silky left breast; I was leaving the abandoned brickyard with its dune of builders' sand where, although weakened by thirst and multiple wounds, I had performed such feats of courage, feats rivaled only by those I accomplished on the flat-topped hill of Washington Park; leaving the iron daybed where, in my aroused dreams, my face had come closer and closer to Sister Mary-Theresa's until our cheeks touched beneath her winged wimple and, suffused in the fresh-bread-and-yellow-bar-soap smell of nun, I received delicious relief in my sleep; leaving behind the smell of fever and Balm Bengué as my mother hung over the edge of her bed to drain her lungs; and the long walks back from Dish Night at the Paramount Theater, and stories about my grandfather told as late-night trolley cars clanged and squealed through the paperweight snowfall on their way down Clinton Avenue to the turn at Pearl-a-Street-Pearl-a-Street-Pearl-a-Street. Trolley wheels and train wheels repeat the street's name until its essence mixes with 'In the Mood' and both dry up, leaving only a husk of peh-ta-kleet... peh-ta-kleet... peh-ta-kleet.