The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (12 page)

But Mother was determined to save my sister and me from accepting the values and limitations of North Pearl Street as our own, and radio wasn't her only means of accomplishing this. On Saturday afternoons when admission was free, she would pack a lunch (usually bean sandwiches) and take us for an enlightening visit to the Schuyler Mansion. Confident that her French ancestry, however distant, endowed her with innate good taste, she would openly criticize the decor of the rooms, describing what colors she would have used, or what fabrics, and I would cringe at the stares she collected from the tight-lipped volunteer guides. It never occurred to me to doubt my mother's aesthetic judgment, I only wished she expressed it less freely... and loudly. But she thought it was best to be frank with people who were in error. How else would they learn? On those weekdays when there was no school because of religious holidays, we would walk up State Street to the Natural History Museum to broaden our understanding of the world and its wonders by standing in awe beneath the high-arching skeleton of a dinosaur held up by a metal armature; or, wandering alone through those vast halls, we would gaze at the realistic woodland dioramas of plaster Indians sitting around glowing lightbulb fires, or we would peer down into glass display cases, browsing on such scientific wonders as birds' eggs, ore samples and arrowheads, and Mother and I would take turns reading the inscriptions in half-whispers that hissed in the echoing marble corridors.

On Sundays, when the weather permitted, we would walk all the way up to Washington Park to eat our sandwiches beside the little lake before going over to the big four-man wooden 'gondola' swings. Anne-Marie and I would sit on one side facing Mother, who would push the bottom bar with her feet and pull the crossbar with her arms until we got the considerable bulk swinging, slowly at first because our legs were too short to help much, then faster and higher as Mother pumped harder and harder until we swung high enough to rock and shake the framework. At the apex of the swing, our stomachs went weightless and Anne-Marie and I giggled helplessly, then we swooped down through space and our stomachs rose within us as fright moistened our palms and weakened our grips on the crossbar. One of the old men who served as park wardens would shout up at us not to swing so high, and Mother would laugh and shout down to him: go to hell! and he would shake his head and go away muttering. Just as her encounters with the guides at the Schuyler Mansion left me proud of her refined taste but uncomfortable about her willingness to share it, so these confrontations with park authority made me proud of her feisty independence and yet embarrassed. You shouldn't swear at old men.

Washington Park's wide lanes were tended by WPA crews that wandered through, each man taking personal responsibility for picking up five leaves. The late-Victorian esplanade had been laid out as an ambulatory park for 'promenading', which Mother, who read historical novels and knew about such things, described as a social ritual in which pairs of snappy young men in boaters and candy-striped blazers strolled along in the hope of meeting two modern young women in wasp-waisted, pigeon-breasted Gibson-girl dresses walking in the opposite direction, arm in arm. Nods and half bows might be exchanged the second time around, and perhaps a smile or even a word the third. And if, by astonishing coincidence, they met again the following week, who knows? Names might be exchanged. Snappy sayings might be produced and laughed at. Dynasties have been founded on such oblique negotiations between urgent genes.

Washington Park was my favorite of Mother's no-cost cultural expeditions designed to remind us that there was a world beyond North Pearl Street, so it was natural that I usually ended up there the handful of times I played hooky from school, which I did for the thrill of wrongdoing, or out of boredom when I knew that a teacher would be grinding her way for the third, fourth, fifth time through some matter that was self-evident to anyone with an IQ larger than his shoe size. I also played hooky out of duty to my self-image as a real boy, in imitation of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Thomas Bailey Aldrich's Bad Boy.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note11#note11” ??[11]? As with so many social trespasses, most of the fun of playing hooky was in the planning and anticipation... in fact, just about all of it, because there was almost nothing that a boy wandering alone on a school day through strange streets and back alleys could find to do, with no destination, no money, and not daring to come too near his own neighborhood for fear of being recognized and reported to his mother. The night before, I would make up story games about the adventures a lone boy prowling through the city might get involved in. Most of these came from books and radio and had to do with foiling crooks, spies, blackmailers or kidnappers. Unfortunately, the heroes in the books were always big, brave, handsome crack shots, so I was obliged to work out story games in which my advantage as a crime fighter lay in my having the appearance of a skinny little kid, so no one suspected me of being, in fact, a heroic protector of the oppressed and the endangered. The basic lead-in to my adventures would be something like this: I'm wandering down some street, and a beautiful woman rushes out onto her stoop and looks desperately up and down the street for a kid; and I'm the only kid around because it's a school day. The reason she needs a kid is that she can't get into her apartment because (a) she has lost her keys, (b) some cruel guy has locked her out, (c) it isn't her apartment, but that of a fear-crazed friend who has telephoned, begging her to rush over and help her, but when she got to the friend's apartment, the door was locked and no one responded to her frantic knocking. There is a narrow transom above the door that a kid might be able to squeeze through, and that's why she so desperately needs a kid, particularly a skinny kid. Well, I would set my lunch bucket aside and roll up my sleeves, and the beautiful woman would interlace her fingers and I'd put my foot into the hand-stirrup and she'd boost me up and I'd wriggle through the transom, drop down on the inside and open the door. And from there the adventure took any of a hundred paths, all of which ultimately led to the bad guys being thwarted ('thwarted' and 'foiled' were verbs applied only to villains), and in the end the beautiful woman invited me to drop in any time I wanted to sit by the fire in their richly appointed salon and read any book in their huge library while I nibbled on the delicious things their servants left out for me. I don't remember any romantic enticements—I was, after all, only seven when these story games began—so I don't know why the heroines were always beautiful. Just narrative convention, I guess.

I usually ended up in Washington Park after wandering through the prosperous streets abutting it, tacitly offering my services to any beautiful heroine who might be in need of a kid to shinny through her transom. Finally giving up, I would drift into the park where I would stylishly out-fence then ruthlessly decapitate a few weeds with a stick-rapier, chuck pebbles into the man-made lake to see the ripples spread like Mrs Kane's rumors, then climb the flat-topped artificial hill that had been created out of the spoil from digging the lake it overlooked. Up there, I would be out of sight of the omnipresent truant officers with which my guilt populated the park: truant officers disguised as bums, as park wardens, as old men sunning themselves on benches, maybe even as women pushing baby carriages... the sly rats!

While the story-weaving and the anticipation of coming across some great adventure were rich and rewarding, the reality of playing hooky was not. It was usually a long, boring day of aimless wandering, and even worse when it rained and I was obliged to spend time in doorways or in dark, silent churches from which I returned home tired, cold and saddened to have been born too late for the great era of discovery and adventure. For lack of anything else to do, I almost always ate my lunch in mid-morning, so by the time I got home I was not only grumpy about being born too late, I was also very hungry.

After visiting the Schuyler Mansion for our refinement, the Natural History Museum for our understanding, or Washington Park for our spirit of adventure, my sister, mother and I would walk home, playing 'Name That Tune' or 'I Spy', or trying to avoid stepping on cracks in the sidewalk while not appearing to do so to anyone who might be watching our progress down the street. It's hard not to break out laughing as you do this because you have to keep your head up and look down your nose to spot the cracks, which makes you cross-eyed, and you have to take shorter or longer steps while trying to appear perfectly natural. We would arrive at 238 after dark; Mother would make soup and sandwiches; then we would end our perfect day sitting in the dark, listening to the radio. Somehow, radio programs were always best listened to in the dark with only the amber glow of the dial.

Pearl Street Blues

My memories of Pearl Street are set against seasonal and meteorological backdrops that might be termed 'folkloristically correct'. Most of the old fairy tales and story books that established the traditional settings for America's seasons were written and illustrated in New England, where March is indeed windy and April showery, where Halloween obligingly rustles with the ghostly susurrus of crisp fallen leaves and there is a crust of early snow for Thanksgiving. I used to feel sorry for children from the West and the South who were obliged to accept these literary givens despite the evidence of their senses... sweating, sunburned kids in Hawaii or Galveston who had to make do with cotton wool snow for their windows. I felt lucky to have been brought up where the seasons were folkloristically correct.

Pearl Street, Fall. Illustrations in the dog-eared old primers we used at school showed boys in knickers and girls in pinafores happily jumping through piles of fallen leaves, but our block had no trees to shed leaves, so fall is symbolized for me by the beginning of the school year. Book covers were made from brown paper bags and we bought new notebooks that I promised this year for sure—for sure—I would keep neat and un-scribbled-on, but sooner or later my bored hand would begin to doodle autonomically, and by the time I noticed what I was doing, it was too late, the purity of the notebook was compromised and, on the virgin-or-whore principle, I felt free to fill the notebook with doodles, multiplications of massive numbers, and lists of words from one of my boredom-slaying pastimes, seeing how many words of more than four syllables I could think of beginning with the letter... ? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note12#note12” ??[12]?

Pearl Street, Winter. I can envision those eternal narcotized afternoons during my last year at P.S. 5, before Mother transferred me to Our Lady of Angels school because I had been getting bad grades and warnings about my 'behavior and attitude' ever since Miss Cox died. Chalk dust hangs in the air, momentarily defining a pale winter sunbeam. Bored, I let my mind drift... drift... my dip pen stops and a furry blot blossoms where the nib touches the paper... my heavy-lidded eyes rest on the unfinished portrait of George Washington that makes him seem to be emerging from clouds... beside him, a limp flag to which we pledge our allegiance every morning, flinging our arms straight out, palms down, as we say '...to the flag of the United States of America. With the coming of the Second World War, the teachers would discontinue this gesture that seemed too close to the Nazi salute, and tell us to keep our hands over our hearts.

Pearl Street, Spring. A fleeting few weeks between the searching cold of winter and the oppressive heat of summer, Spring was as perilous as it was ephemeral. Although your mother warned you not to, and although you knew from experience that you shouldn't, you always shed your winter jacket too soon and let your winter-stiff legs stretch as you ran, scudded along from behind by the March wind, and you inevitably ended up with a tenacious head cold. Because she always had a stuffed-up nose, the urban Goddess of Spring pronounced her name 'Sprig', and that, for the etymologically curious, is how new spring branches came to be called 'sprigs'.

Pearl Street, Summer day. Roller-skating up and down the street to the click-clack of the cracks beneath your wheels as your roller-skate key swings from a string around your neck. We had only one pair of roller skates bought from a woman whose child had died of polio, they were too wide for Anne-Marie and too short for me, but we managed, taking turns, she slipping around on the skates, me with pinched toes. My feet still remember how, when you've unclamped the skates from your shoes after hours of skating, the soles of your feet continue to tingle, remembering the pavement.

Pearl Street, Summer night. People sit on their stoops on hot nights, talking lazily. I walk down the street, looking up at the full moon, which seems to travel with me at the speed of my walk, weaving its way through the power lines, and I wonder if there is another boy in some other town, maybe some foreign country, looking up as he walks and assuming the moon is following him, too.

And through all seasons, our radio offered Your Lucky Strike Hit Parade and brought the Big Bands to us from dance halls and ballrooms across the nation, providing the songs that formed a musical background for the troubles and joys that textured our lives on North Pearl Street.

Let's Face the Music and Dance... There's a Small Hotel... Easy to Love... I've Got You Under My Skin... I Can't Get Started (with you)... Little Old Lady

Most of the games kids played on our block were the same as those we had known in Lake George Village. Aside from those anonymous roughhouse games that give boys a chance to knock one another around and barge into clumps of girls, who protest and squeal, but continue to stand about, hoping to be barged into by a boy they think is 'cute'; boys had marbles and mumblety-peg, both played in the vacant lot beside Kane's cornerstore where there was some sooty dirt for drawing marble circles and for jack knives to stick into. Quick-handed little girls played jacks on the wide top step of the stoops, or skipped and dipped over chalked hopscotch patterns that blossomed on the sidewalks each morning only to become foot-smudged palimpsests by nightfall. Bigger girls jumped rope to the rhythm of those chants, some modern, topical and ephemeral, others ancient, metaphorical and eternal, that were, and I hope still are, the folk poetry of the slums. Most of these chants ended with counting the number of times 'Bonnie Johnny kissed ya sistah' or how often 'the ghost of Cindy Flinders came a-tappin' atcha winders', or the number of crullers the jumper could eat at a sitting, or the number of lovers she would have, or of children, or the number of miles she would run to avoid a certain boy (or to catch another one). The pace and volume of the enumeration rose until the ordeal ended with high-speed 'hot pepper' skips that separated the mediocre jumpers from the stars and made frustrated younger sisters yearn to beat triumphant older ones—just once! Soon, too soon, the arrival of 'the curse' would thrust each girl in turn into gawky, giggling puberty, which would oblige her to scorn both sidewalk games and the insufferable babies who still played them.