The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (29 page)

But for now, I decided to go back. I could afford to be magnanimous now that I knew I would someday hit the road and be free. I hadn't forgiven my mother for pushing me away, but I didn't want to cause her further anguish. And my sister was probably worried about me. And anyway... I was hungry.

A moonless night had fallen by the time I threaded my way through Rensselaer's deserted freight yard. Crossing the railroad bridge at night as the Hudson seethed and purled below was a slower and more daunting business than crossing it by daylight. To assure my balance in the disorientating dark, I kept my hand on the weathered, splintery wooden railing and I felt for the center of each railroad tie with my foot before putting my weight on it. About a quarter of the way across, I felt a slight quiver underfoot. I looked back and saw the distant headlight of a freight train piercing the river mist as it made a slow, creaking turn towards the bridge. I froze.

I'd better go back before—no, no, I'll rush forward and—no, wait, maybe I'd better... Too late!

The engine was already on the bridge, its sides nearly scraping the wooden railings. I hurried on, trying to out-run it, but my foot slipped off the rain-slick ties and my leg went up to the knee into the gap between, barking my shin. The bridge began to vibrate. With a yelp of panic I yanked my leg back out, giving my shin a second painful scrape. A quick glance back at the train. The cone of light was so bright that when I held up my hand to shield my eyes I could see finger bones, like an X ray. I waved my arms and shouted, but the roar and hiss of the engine, the squeal of the wheels and the groaning of the bridge absorbed my voice. No whistle... the engineer hadn't seen me. The bridge throbbed and shuddered. My heart pounding, I clambered over the railing and stood out on the ends of the ties, clinging to the handrail, my butt out over the river, and I turned my face away as the metal-screeching, steam-hissing engine passed inches from my knuckles. My eyes were squeezed shut but the powerful light filled my head with bright orange. Gasping for breath, I gripped the railing with all my might as the chaos of noise, vibration and hot metal passed so close that it stirred my hair. I knew that I was clinging to the railing too hard, using up my strength. I should ease my grip a little... but I couldn't! I was afraid that the slightest relaxation would drop me into the river. After an eternal five seconds of clamor-roar-squeal-clash in my face and panic screaming within my head, the engine passed, and the freight cars rattled and creaked close to my fingers, which continued to clutch so hard that the fingertips were splayed flat. When the freight cars finally passed I opened my eyes to see the little red light on the caboose receding into a swirl of steam and smoke. My knees buckled with relief—and that sent a fresh tingle of fright into my testicles. I climbed back over the railing very carefully, because it would be just my rotten luck to slip and fall into the river after the train passed!

For a long time I sat on the end of a tie, completely drained, my arms wrapped around a tacky creosote spar, my legs dangling over the abyss.

It was late when I eased open the door of our apartment and slipped in. My sister was already in bed, and my mother was sitting in the kitchen over a cold cup of coffee. I stood in the kitchen door; she lifted her head and looked at me with battered eyes.

“I found a place out of the rain,” I said.

She reached out and felt my corduroy knickers. “You're wet to the bone. You're going to have a fever for sure. You better take a hot bath. I'll heat up some soup.”

When I undressed, my socks stuck to the congealing gouges on my shin, making me flinch and snort. I said only that I'd fallen down, and without further question Mother gently cleaned the wounds then dabbed them with iodine, which stung and made me suck air through my teeth.

I soaked in the tub with my knees up to keep my shins dry. She sat on the toilet lid and looked down on me sadly. “You're your father's son, all right. Nine years old, and you've already run away from me twice.” “Twice?”

“The first time you were just three. You took your brand new red trike with you and left it somewhere. We never found it.”

“Oh... yes. I forgot about that. But I didn't run away this time.”

Her eyes widened. “What do you mean?”

She needed to believe I hadn't deserted her, as my father had. “Jeez, you didn't think I'd run out on you, did you? I wouldn't do that. Never. Oh, sure, I was mad, but I only wanted to get away and think things out. But then it started to rain, and I had to stay in this bus place until the rain stopped, and by then it was dark, so I... But I always meant to come back.”

“You'd never run out on me? Is that the truth, Jean-Luc? Cross your heart?”

“And hope to die, Mom.”

During the '30s and '40s, most urban Americans went to the movies at least once a week, even though this meant an outlay of from twenty-five to fifty cents for adults (not counting popcorn or candy) and between a dime and fifteen cents for children. With only a few exceptions, my paper route provided the two dimes required for Anne-Marie and me to attend the weekly triple-feature kids' matinee offered by the Grand Theater on the corner of North Pearl Street and Clinton Avenue where the atmosphere tightened with joyful anticipation as the theater filled with noisy, restive kids laughing, whistling through their fingers, calling across aisles to one another, throwing paper wads, clattering their chair seats. Those rich enough to buy candy made much show of noisily unwrapping bars and opening popcorn boxes, while near-nubile girls found it necessary to go up the aisle from their front-row seats, walking quickly, always in twos, their heads down to show how desperately they hoped they weren't being noticed, then returning to their seats, where they clutched one another and rolled their eyes and twisted with embarrassment at the thought that you-know-who might have been looking at them... but soon finding another urgent reason to go out to the lobby, even if it did involve running the distressing gauntlet of gawking boys... who in fact never paid the slightest attention to them.

Just as the chaos and confusion reached a frenetic pitch, the theater would darken, and the kids would cheer to the rising notes of a steam-organ version of 'The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down' that introduced the first of two or three cartoons. A final scuttling for seats, and the kids' triple-feature was on. This usually involved a C-grade western by Monogram or Republic, with such stalwarts as Hoot Gibson, Whip Wilson, Lash LaRue, Ken Maynard, or the Three Mesquiteers, a trio of cowboys who rode out of the mesquite-covered prairie to help the weak and foil the bad guys. One of these Mesquiteers was the rangy young John Wayne, who had a clumsy, faintly effeminate walk that he would later convert into the ursine burlesque of feline grace that became a trademark. The western was followed either by a scary film about vampires or werewolves or mummies, or a B detective film featuring The Saint, or Boston Blackie, or Charlie Chan (with his wisecracking all-American number-one son), then there would be a knock-about comedy, the kids' favorite being a new comic team that appeared a couple of years before the war: Abbott and Costello. Interspersed among the features were a March of Time, a weekly newsreel and an adventure serial each episode of which ended with the hero locked in a room with a lit stick of dynamite, or being crushed as a mine caved in or clinging by his fingernails to the rim of a cliff above a raging river (whence the term 'cliff-hanger'), then we'd have a travelogue narrated by some fruity-voiced man and shot in a cheap color stock that was mostly brown and blue, and then at least two comic shorts like Behind the Eightball or the Ritz Brothers or Laurel and Hardy (the most under-rated comics of the sound era, just as the Marx Brothers are the most over-rated).? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note24#note24” ??[24]? After the Saturday Special's six-hour assault on your senses, you would stagger, blinking, out into the drab, insipid real world (still sinfully sunlit in summer), your eyes blurry, your ears buzzing, your knees stiff, your butt numb, but your soul effervescent with adventure and your spirit strengthened by personal experiences of peril and courage.

My sister and I saw movies of a very different sort on the first and third Thursdays of each month when our mother brought us to Dish Night at the Paramount Theater, a hole-in-the-wall neighborhood movie house that smelled of dust and bug spray. The management tried to bolster receipts on these slow nights by offering dishes at the door and a double feature: a family comedy followed by what my mother called 'drama films', in which broad-shouldered heroines wearing thick lipstick drew cigarette smoke far down into their lungs then exhaled it through mouth and nose simultaneously as they slogged their way through an hour and a half of histrionic athletics, standing with their hands on their hips and snapping sassy lines to bland, baffled men. Pencil-thin eyebrows arched, nostrils flaring, lips compressed, eyes flashing, they indulged in towering rages, or wept torrents, or bravely fought back their tears... and sometimes all three within ten minutes. Characterized by high-contrast 'hatchet' lighting and expressionistic camera angles, these drama films relied heavily on background music so volcanic that half of the string section risked getting violin elbow in their efforts to support the performances of Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford or the relative newcomer, Susan Hayward, all of whom viewed their craft as an essentially quantitative affair and sought to satisfy their emotionally undernourished fans by loading each gesture, each glance, each word with tons and tons of 'acting'.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note25#note25” ??[25]?

These high-calorie feasts of passion left a boy of ten feeling that love was a dark and dangerous business.

Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were my mother's favorite actresses, and she identified with the roles they played: strong women done in by weak and duplicitous men but standing against the world. Photographs of Mother when she was a Charleston champion reveal that she looked something like Joan Crawford, who, towards the end of the silent era, had played Charleston-mad I-don't-care girls.

With the first blush of puberty, girls who had been happy enough with the raucous chaos of a kids' matinee suddenly developed, as a kind of secondary sexual trait, a taste for the bathetic involutions of drama films and the emotional gymnastics of the actresses who played in them, while boys of the same age displayed a healthy shallowness of spirit and aesthetic judgment that made them prefer westerns, gangster films, historical adventures (which we called sword-fighting movies) and, after 1942, war films in which actors like John Wayne, having managed to stay out of the real war, shot, bombed and bayoneted two or three thousand Nazi or Nip extras per film.

Although my mother loved her drama films and my sister was fascinated by the costumes, it was the lure of a door prize of free dishes that justified our indulgence. We had enough dishes for our needs, but nothing matched, and it was Mother's plan to collect a service for four, just in case we had a guest to dinner, though we couldn't imagine who this might be. The acquisition of these dishes helped to salve her conscience about spending money on movies once every two weeks. She estimated it would take two and a half years to collect the full set, but it didn't work out that way because sometimes they gave dishes to kids and other times only to those who had adult tickets, and they never seemed to have the bigger pieces, like dinner plates or serving dishes, so we ended up with three soup bowls and half a dozen salad plates. I found one of those milky green glass soup bowls among Mother's things when she died more than forty years later and three thousand miles from Pearl Street.

On Dish Thursdays, Anne-Marie and I had to finish our homework early while Mother made a quick supper of potato soup and bean sandwiches, then the three of us would walk up Clinton Avenue to the theater where, in addition to the films, the free dishes, and the usual bouquet of newsreels and short subjects, there would be either Screeno (a projected version of bingo, but we never won the free passes that were the prizes) or an amateur talent show emcee'd by the theater manager, who would dress up in a bright red jacket and crack jokes that we'd all heard on Jack Benny or Bob Hope earlier that week. Mother used to fantasize that one of these days Anne-Marie would dance in that talent show, and she'd bring the house down with applause, and the next thing you know, talent scouts from Paramount studios—it was a Paramount Theater, after all, wasn't it?—would come knocking at our door, and there she'd be! Our ship! Standing at the dock!

This semi-monthly outing cost us a quarter for Mother's ticket and ten cents for each of us kids. Forty-five cents was a significant chunk of our budget, so we never bought candy or popcorn, but if the movies had been particularly long and Anne-Marie was sleepy when we got out at nearly midnight, or if it was snowing or raining, we sometimes spent an extra fifteen cents for the three of us to ride the trolley back down the Clinton Avenue hill, and get off just after the trolley's metal-screeching turn at Pearl Street. A total of sixty cents spent in just one night! Without my paper route, that extravagance would have been unthinkable.

During our long, late-night walks home from the Paramount Theater with Anne-Marie plodding along between Mother and me, half-asleep on her feet, I could usually get Mother to tell stories about her youth in Fort Anne, where her energy and competitive spirit brought her such success at boys' games and sports that she was known to the tish-tish-ing townswomen as 'that LaPointe girl', a reckless hoyden who could out-run, out-climb, out-shout and out-brag any boy in the village. I loved hearing about the outrageous pranks her gang used to play on Halloween: the live snake she once tossed into a passing roadster full of college boys up from Albany, who scrambled out doors and windows before the car came to a full stop in a ditch; how, late one night, one of her 'gang' surreptitiously moved an abusive drunk's privy back a yard, so that its hole was in front of its door; the shovelful of fresh horse manure they put on an old grouch's front porch, then covered it with newspaper which they lit before knocking on his door and running away, and when he came out, he automatically tried to stamp the fire out only to discover... God damn those kids!