The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (18 page)

Love Walked Right In... You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby... Music, Maestro, Please... I've Got a Pocket Full of Dreams...

My dominant memory of our summers is the crushing heat. Unlike the lakeside village of my early childhood with its breezy summer days and cool nights, there was no relief from the oppressive heat waves of 1936 and 1938, two of the hottest ever recorded in Albany. Children suffered rashes and heat prostration, and some old people died of breathing problems. No one had electric fans, and air-conditioning was a thing of the future, except in a few movie houses, where it was concentrated in the lobby, so you could feel its effect upon entering and be attracted back out to the cool lobby during intermissions to buy candy or popcorn. The city's cement and brick absorbed heat all through the day and radiated it out into the street after dark, so the nights were as hot as the days. People who lived on upper floors where the heat was the worst allowed their kids to sleep out on fire escapes in nests of sweat-sodden pillows and sofa cushions, while the parents sat out on their stoops late into the night, fanning themselves with pieces of cardboard, and complaining sleepily about the heat. Every third or fourth day, a fireman would come and screw a spray nozzle onto a fire hydrant, then he'd open it with a big two-handed wrench so that little kids in their underwear could dash through the spray while bigger kids in sodden dresses or knickers struggled against the weight of the gush, striving to approach the hydrant, defying the pounding force of the water on their chests, then laughing helplessly as they were driven back, their feet slipping over the smooth, wet cobblestones. Even grown-up women would stand on the edges of the spray, smiling as they caught handfuls of cool iridescent mist in their palms and rubbed it over their arms and necks, receiving it like a blessing from God. Adolescent boys would yearn to strip down and rush in but, fearful of compromising their newly acquired reputations for being tough and cool, they were obliged to lean against the buildings with their hands in their pockets and look on, sneering. And sweating.

One scorching day when Anne-Marie and I were playing in the fire hydrant spray I looked up to see my mother dressed in the boyishly cut bathing suit of her flapper days, laughing as she fought her way towards the hydrant against the pounding force of the water, the only adult among the kids. It was like her to surrender to a caprice and come play with us, and I was proud of her youth and vivacity, but I was intensely aware of the brittle stares of other mothers sitting on their stoops, women who could never have squeezed into the swimsuits they had worn as teenagers, and who thought that those who revealed their bodies by doing so were little better than hussies. Swimsuits of my mother's era were made of thick wool knit so the water would drain quickly out, leaving the suit dry enough to provide some protection against cold Atlantic winds. When, breathless with laughter and the cold water, she stepped out of the stream and stood on the curb to watch Anne-Marie and me play, the water immediately drained out of her suit in a steady stream that fell from between her legs onto the cement, and one of the adolescent boys noticed this and nudged a friend to point it out. Look at her. Pissing on the sidewalk. I slipped away and went back into the house, the fun and relief of the fire hydrant spray ruined.

The 'difference' for which the neighbor ladies never forgave my mother expressed itself not only in a sense of dress that was lodged in her 'heyday', the 'Twenties, with the bell-bottom slacks and the close-fitting sweaters that revealed the existence of breasts, two distinct breasts with nipples, not the undefined shelf of wobbly flesh that other mothers had at their chests. There was also her boyish, rather choppy haircut that she did for herself in front of the bathroom mirror holding kitchen scissors in one hand and the wet strand of hair in the other. And the way she was always polite to crazy Mrs Meehan, whom other women ignored broadly whenever they passed the cluster of houses that sheltered that incestuous clan. “It takes one to know one,” the women would mutter under their breath when they saw Mrs Meehan running up to Mother to say hello. But the most unforgivably 'different' thing she did was to come out onto the street and play with my sister and me, just as though she were a kid. Kick-the-can, or Simon-says, or tag with a lamp post as 'home'. She would jump rope with Anne-Marie, or play the French-Canadian version of Ring-Around-the-Roses: Rond, rond, macaron. Ta p'tite soeur est à la maison. Fais ceçi, fais cela, ah... ah... achoo!

The block responded to Mother's difference by deciding that she was crazy. Not dangerous, and not as crazy as some, but a crazylady nonetheless. And that made me the son of a crazylady. As if I didn't have a sufficient burden of difference to bear on my own account.

But it was true that Mother was never quite in step with everyday realities. Everything that happened to her was heavily colored, either with portent or with promise. Her alternate moods of black depression and soaring elation converted minor setbacks into catastrophic disasters and occasional bits of good luck into spreading vistas of eternal promise, so she reeled from feeling crushed by the weight of her troubles to being treacherously deceived by false omens of good fortune.

She had been born with a zest for life, the resilience to overcome the rough moments, and the appetite to relish the pleasant ones. But a series of confidence-eroding events left her defensive, baffled, wounded and ready to wound in return.

The feelings my sister and I had for our mother were an uneasy blend of love, gratitude and apprehension. Our love was the unquestioned love of a child for his parent, the simple and comforting foundation for our daily lives. Our gratitude was for the way she unfailingly encouraged us and nourished our slightest glimmer of talent or gift, although we were sometimes uncomfortable with the expectations that accompanied that encouragement. Our apprehension had to do with her hair-trigger temper that lashed out at the least slight to her dignity. Those whose ethnic roots are grounds for popular derision become understandably touchy, and in bellicose compensation, they flaunt those ridiculed roots (as in: I'm a Martian and proud of it!). My mother boasted about being French and Indian. She viewed the first as the source of her innate good taste, and the second as making her dangerous to cross. Her French blood was really only rustic habitant Canadian, probably not racially French at all in origin, but either Nordic-Norman or Gaelic-Breton, like most of the early immigrants to Canada; but the war-like Indian was genuine enough.

This Can't Be Love... A-Tisket A-Tasket... Falling in Love with Love... My Prayer... I Can Dream, Can't I...

I first read about our Onondaga tribe one rainy autumn afternoon when I was cozily ensconced in a secret nest I had found in the architectural hodgepodge of the library at the corner of North Pearl and Clinton Avenue. Soon after our arrival in Albany my mother got library cards for the three of us, but I didn't find this library useful or attractive because I was issued a child's card that restricted me to a basement Children's Library that had cheery messages cut out of colored paper and pinned on the walls, and a corner for toddlers with little chairs and plenty of picture books for them to rip up and eat. For older kids, there were story books with salubrious moral parables, collections of things to do around the house on rainy days, and so-called Youth Books obviously written by middle-aged people who had had children described to them in considerable detail, but had never actually met one. I quickly used up the few good books, like Howard Pyle's splendid illustrated adventures, and I had just about given up on finding anything else of interest when, one long, rainy afternoon in autumn, I noticed a cast-iron spiral staircase in the corner most distant from the librarian's desk, and hidden from her by a ceiling-to-floor bookcase that blocked off access to the stairs. While the librarian sat at a table coloring in the letters of yet another poster, her mind focused on not running over the edge of the lines, I squeezed in behind the bookcase and noiselessly climbed the spiral stairs, inching up into a dusty, enticing darkness, until my outstretched hand discovered a door which I was sure must be locked, so I turned to go back down. But the devil told me to try the handle. It wasn't locked. I eased it open a crack and peeked out to find myself in a dark corner of a Victorian-Gothic room with oaken paneling and tall, narrow windows with stained glass depicting events in the history of Albany. It was the home of the De Witt Clinton Memorial Collection, bulging with bound manuscripts, diaries, records, personal memoranda; all rare, all arid, few read. For me, there was a rich rift of old books about the Indians of our state. Other than occasional staff meetings, the only use made of this room was to store trolleys of returned books that were left there until a librarian had time to re-shelve them. A book on one of these trolleys was in a kind of limbo: it had been checked in, but not yet put back into circulation, so it had dropped out of the library's retrieval system, and I could take such a book and keep it for weeks, eventually returning it to one of the trolleys when I was through with it. For three years I used the De Witt Clinton Room as a cozy hide-out. After selecting one of my personal books from where I stashed them behind a row of over-sized volumes on a lower shelf, I would scramble up into the deep niche of a Gothic stained-glass window where I was warmed by rising currents of air from an ornate radiator at my feet, and its ancient plumbing would alternate deep intestinal gurglings with long soulful sighs as I read by light diffused through colored glass. My most comforting memories of the years in Albany are the hours I spent reading in that hidden nest, dark and cool in summer, cozily warm in winter, but best when hard raindrops rattled on the stained glass behind me, and color rippled over the page of my book, while I lost myself in the story, safe, dry and warmed by my sighing, gurgling radiator.

I was installed in my reading niche one afternoon, playing hooky, as I often did after Miss Cox's death, when I first read about the Onondagas ('keepers-of-the-middle-lodge'), my grandfather's tribe, and therefore mine. I learned that from its central position within the five-nation Iroquois Federation the Onondagas acted as arbitrators in times of political discord. As befitted the tribe of Hiawatha, the Onondagas were also the Federation's story-tellers and weavers of myth. So, it was in my blood to be a story-teller and a weaver of myths! How about that? No wonder I lived such an intense secret life of story games in which I was pitted against Redcoats, Saracens, Cattle Ruslers and Cardinal Richelieu's men, or, a couple of years later, the sneering Nazis and leering Japanese. This early belief that I was a born tale-weaver sustained me in my eventual life's work, telling stories like this one. There is a parallel between my becoming a writer and how men of another Iroquoian tribe, the Mohawks, became the builders of America's skyscrapers, able to work on naked steel girders at great heights without a trace of vertigo. Despite their cocky confidence and firmly held beliefs, there is no genetic basis for the 'natural balance' they claim to be born with, but their confidence gives them the ability to work high iron in wind and rain, protected from those lethal panic attacks that make the palms of lesser men sweat and their knees tremble. Mohawks have no vertigo because they believe they have no vertigo, just as I dare to face a pile of blank paper every day because I believe that I share the Onondagan aptitude for story-telling. This is one of those things that are dangerous to think about too long because if confidence sires ability out of daring, then what happens if a little crack appears in that confidence and doubt begins to seep through and spread and widen until you lose the belief that you can... whoa, there! Leave it alone. Don't pick at thoughts like that. They infect.

Whistle While You Work... Heart and Soul... While a Cigarette Was Burning... Flat Foot Floogie... Alexander's Ragtime Band...

I heard people talk about Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and we occasionally saw them in movie newsreels, but I never got the impression that anyone felt menaced by these comic figures, the one a strutting, pouting clown, the other a ranting, mechanical doll version of Charlie Chaplin. Then, in March of 1938, German soldiers marched into Austria, and within a few days that country was absorbed into the Third Reich. Newsreels showed Hitler arriving to declare Austria a province of the Reich, while Austrian children cheered and waved little flags with what looked like genuflecting crosses on them. Then we heard no more about Austria. Other events filled the news.

Mr Kane, who had relatives in Austria, was listening to short-wave broadcasts from Vienna the day the Germans marched in. He was not at all complacent about these events. He tried to explain them to me one evening on his side steps, mentioning people whose odd-sounding German names immediately slipped out of my memory (probably von Papen, Seyss-Inquart and Schuschnigg) and calling what had happened 'the anschluss', which I did remember because he repeated it several times and it had a strangely slippery sound. Seeing my confusion, he went into his living quarters behind the store, and came back with an atlas, which he opened to a page that showed central Europe. With his finger, he traced the eastern border of the new 'greater Germany' that included Austria, and he pointed out that it looked like the gaping jaws of a wolf. Then he tapped the western end of Czechoslovakia. “How would you like to be living between those jaws at this moment?” he asked. “There... in the Sudetenland.”

Stairway to the Stars... Sunrise Serenade... Little Sir Echo... My Prayer... Beer Barrel Polka... Oh, Johnny, Oh, Johnny, Oh!... Three Little Fishies...

One manifestation of my mother's famous French-'n'-Indian pride was her refusal to accept that, poor though we were, her kids couldn't have what she called a 'decent Christmas', which meant receiving presents that were much too expensive for our budget, bought with money she earned working night shifts at restaurants through the Christmas season. She never seemed to be aware of how frightened my sister and I were that our family would be broken up by social workers who believed her ill health made her an unfit mother, all because she was stubbornly determined to give us presents as nice as other kids got... come Helen Highwater. I associate these 'decent Christmases' with my mother lying on the living room couch, coughing and fevered, while my sister and I opened presents, all the while dreading that she would end up in a hospital again, and we would be obliged to conceal the fact that she wasn't home from those social work people whose primary mission in life seemed to be to send us to some institution. Only once did they catch us and send us to an orphans' home. But that once was enough.