The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (33 page)

But it wasn't from the movies that I garnered the greater part of my understanding of romantic love; it was from the radio. My mother's favorite weekly radio-theater was First Nighter, which began with the buzz of an expectant audience in a theater as the voice of an usher said, “Right this way, Mister First Nighter. Two seats on the aisle, center section.” Then the curtain would go up to a riffle of applause and the play would begin. All First Nighter stories were romances with the basic MLG structure of boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl. The commercials came in the interstices between these structural slabs, the first batch of ads just after the couple broke up, and the second just before they got together again... two moments that the sponsors considered so suspenseful that the listener wouldn't be able to step away from the radio for fear of missing the resolution.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note33#note33” ??[33]? My mother also listened to Grand Central Station, which opened with an excited announcer describing a train's approach to the outskirts of New York City, flashing past rows of tenements, plunging into the dark tunnel leading to the depot, then coming to a stop with a screech of train brakes and a hiss of steam at 'Gra-a-and Central Sta-a-ation! Crossroads of a million private lives!' Each of the love stories began or ended in Grand Central Station, and they too were simple MLG tales in which the couple always broke up through some silly misunderstanding that would make my mother furious because nothing seemed more tragic to her than two people who were meant for each other, passing each other by 'like ships in the night': the first poetic simile I remember her making. (Perhaps because she had, for once, got it right. An instance of anti-chance.)

I also learned quite a bit about the nature of romantic love from soap operas, which operated on the principle that life was a long uphill struggle characterized by work, woe, worry and misfortune... then things suddenly got a lot worse. I listened to soap operas only when my mother had a bout of lung trouble and I had to care for her. While she was devoted to certain soap operas, she dismissed others as mindless trash, but I could never discover what fine measuring instrument she used to distinguish the one from the other.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note34#note34” ??[34]?

It was common for soaps to open with the announcer posing the program's essential question. Our Gal Sunday asked if a girl from a little mining town in Colorado could find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman. Mary Noble, Backstage Wife wondered if a woman could find contentment married to the matinee idol of a million other women. And The Romance of Helen Trent asked if a woman could find love after thirty-five.

To all of these questions, a heartless boy of eleven responded: Who cares?

So, like my understanding of physical love, my youthful notions of romantic love were compounded of many elements, no small part of which came from Dish Night movies and radio soap operas. Armed with these lofty ideals and my own sordid ones, I entered into my first romance, my eternal love for Sister Mary-Theresa, a relationship that was complicated by the fact that we both had official roles within the church.

My becoming an altar boy had nothing to do with piety, or even belief, for that matter. I was a Catholic for the same reason I was left-handed, because I had been born that way. Neither conviction nor spirituality nor a desire for personal salvation played any role in the matter. My common sense, what I had read about Darwinism, and above all my natural inclination towards the rational and away from the authoritarian and the superstitious combined to make me assign much of what was taught in catechism about miracles and the mysteries of the Church to the category of more or less well-intentioned myth.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note35#note35” ??[35]?

As an altar boy I was captivated by the theatricality of the mass and I enjoyed playing my role in it, up there on the stage, wearing a fancy costume. The ritual, the incense, the poetry, the pageantry attracted me so much that, in the course of considering one future occupation after another as a means of taking Mother out of the slums, the idea of becoming a priest briefly passed through my mind, although I couldn't quite see how the priesthood with its vows of poverty could bring in enough money. Well, maybe I'd become a radio priest with a large following to whom I would sell specially blessed medals and phials of holy water. I confess that the fact that priests are obliged to live in priest houses, separated from their mothers, was not without its attraction. Then too, priests were admired and their opinions were sought, and I was pretty sure that I could learn to accept my congregation's respect, even a certain amount of veneration, without damaging the humility they all admired so much in me.

But all thoughts of the priesthood as a vocation were swept away by that watershed moment when Brigid Meehan's warm, silken left breast lay on my palm.

My mother's attitude towards the Church was typical of her uncompromising, black-or-white view of the world, and of her tendency to maintain life-long grudges, a propensity that kept her many self-inflicted wounds from healing. In this case, her grudge was against God. I was reading in bed one night when I heard her crying softly in her bedroom. This happened very seldom, and only when she was in the blackest depression. For a while I just lay there, pretending I didn't hear her. Finally, I got up and went into the kitchen, where I lit the popping gas ring and put on the percolator. I knew the sounds of my moving around in the kitchen would bring her out of her bedroom and into the bathroom, where she would bathe her face in cold water, then come to sit with me. This had become our tacit ritual when she had a bad case of the blues and needed to talk to someone... me. I was putting the ground coffee into the top section of the percolator when she came into the kitchen and sat at the table. I didn't say anything, I just set out her cup and opened a can of evaporated milk—always a tricky business because evaporated milk cans had no rims, so the can opener could easily slip off and stab your hand when you smacked it to punch a hole. I heard her sniff behind me but I didn't turn around. I gave her time to pull herself together, because she hated anyone seeing her cry. When the coffee bubbled brown in the glass top of the percolator, I poured out her cup and put it in front of her (I didn't drink coffee at that age), then I sat at the table across from her, my eyes lowered to the oilcloth.

After a while she began speaking in mid-thought... mid-complaint... as she often did in these rare late-night confessionals. She told me how, one night shortly after my father had left her penniless with a toddler and a new baby to support, she had broken down and sobbed for hours and hours. She didn't know what to do, which way to turn. Her father had all he could do to help feed and shelter her brothers and sisters and their families, as he was the only one in the family whom the Depression had left with a job. She couldn't ask him to do more for her than he was already doing, and that wasn't enough to keep us going.

Well, that night she felt so low, so blue, that she considered suicide. She went so far as to run hot water into the sink and get out a straight razor... the razor my father had left behind that morning when he left to 'look for work'. She stood at the bathroom sink, not daring to look into the mirror for fear of what she'd find in her eyes. But in the end, she couldn't do it. She couldn't leave her children alone in the world. Desperate, she went out into the backyard and knelt in the snow, and for the first time since she had been obliged to attend interminable high masses by her pious aunts in Plattsburg, she prayed. She asked God to help her... to help her children.

She returned to the house and was trying to get some sleep, when suddenly she sat up in bed with the full-blown plan. She would go to live with her father in their old house in Fort Anne. He was all alone, now that her older sister had left to start a life of her own. Mother would keep house for him, and we would be his family. She would finally be the necessary and preferred daughter, making her father's life comfortable, and at the same time providing a home for Anne-Marie and me. The perfect solution! Everything was going to work out. God had heard her prayers and had shown her the way.

Two weeks later, her father died in a road accident.

So that was God's answer to her prayers, was it? All right. All right! From that day on, she never entered a church again and never allowed a priest or a nun into her house. But in her stubborn way, she didn't forsake her belief in the existence of God; instead she carried a lifelong grudge against Him. And if it was true that when you die you pass before God in judgment... well, she'd give him a piece of her French-'n'-Indian mind, believe me you! And if God sent her to hell for it... well, that was all right too! She didn't care!

At this point, she began to cry again. Angry tears at the injustice of it all. I kept my eyes on the oilcloth. After a while, she wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand, finished her coffee, and said, “You don't mind me telling you things like this, do you? I sometimes need to get them off my chest.”

I shook my head.

“You're the only one I can talk to. My good right hand.”

She hugged me and returned to her bedroom, and soon she was asleep. I rinsed out the cup, put the evaporated milk into the icebox, tapped the coffee grounds out into the bucket we used as a garbage pail, and went back to my bed, where I lay, listening to the faint sounds of the street and to the old building creaking and settling.

Despite her grudge against God, Mother insisted that Anne-Marie and I go to church regularly, and she was pleased when I became an altar boy. After all, the fight was between her and Him. He had no right to take it out on her kids.

At the age of eleven I hadn't yet had any sexual experience. Few kids had in that more innocent, more romantic era. But as though to compensate for our lack of experience with evil, the Church had extended the definition of sin beyond deeds, into the shadowy realms of word and thought, and this extension dropped the net of sin over me. While I was completely innocent in deed and nearly so in word, my lively imagination often dragged me into the mires of sin-by-thought, and ultimately beyond the mires of sin, all the way to the inescapable morass of sacrilege. And with a nun, too.

Such adjectives as 'young' and 'pretty' do not rush to mind when trying to describe the nuns at Our Lady of Angels, women whom God had designed for functional rather than decorative purposes; but Sister Mary-Theresa was the least old and homely of those devoted brides of Christ who, beneath their starched wide-winged wimples that hid their hair and made their faces look peeled and vulnerable, sailed in whispering gowns, sweetly smiling and iron-willed, down the halls, through the playgrounds and across the lives of generation after generation of school children. Towards the middle of my second year with Sister Mary-Theresa I wrote for her, unbidden, a sixteen-page paper on the forms and functions of the adverb, which puzzled her at least as much as it impressed her.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note36#note36” ??[36]? In addition, I was a whiz at the high-speed verbal parsing that she considered to be one of life's loftier accomplishments. You might think that these accomplishments were enough to make me the star of her class and living proof that hers could be a noble and rewarding profession. I certainly thought so. And she did occasionally compliment my weekly essays for their 'creativity'. Unfortunately, my spelling was also creative, and when it came to penmanship, I was hopeless. I forgave these failings in myself because I held both spelling and handwriting to be trivial matters, but Sister Mary-Theresa considered them every bit as important as love of language, a rich vocabulary and correct grammar. In her eyes, my orthographic and calligraphic lapses were not only pedagogical, but moral as well, for she believed that bad spelling was a manifestation of sloth, and sloppy penmanship a sure indicator of weak character. Hence, the row of A's on my report card were broken by C's for English, C's that were the average of a roughly equal number of F's for cramped, messy writing and quixotic spelling and A's for such of my work as she could manage to make out.

We wrote with straight nibs that we dipped into glass inkwells set in round holes at the top of our desks. I was totally and unalterably left-handed (willfully so, my early teachers had claimed) so the only way I could avoid passing the heel of my hand over my still-wet writing was to turn the paper sidewards and write from above, guiding the pen with my fingertips, rather than moving my whole arm on the cushion of the forearm, as the Palmer Method required. This accounted for my cramped writing. The blobs and blots that seeded my work came from the tendency of the nib to splay because I held the pen so tightly that the side of my finger had a permanent dent. The splayed point would dig into the paper and leave a blot, and when I lifted the buried pen point from the paper, I would get a little spray of ink dots across the page. I resented being marked down for penmanship so much that I often let my inkwell run low, so that the bits of ink-sodden fuzz and grunge at the bottom would end up on my paper, adding to the patterns of blots and sprays that personalized my writing. In addition, there wasn't a smooth spot on my deeply scarred desktop, so each essay contained at least one messy puncture. Although I felt that she gave such peccadilloes unjust weight in estimating my total grade, I wanted desperately to please Sister Mary-Theresa (to impress her, really) so I would try my hardest to write without blobs and scratch-outs. During the strained silence of the weekly in-class essays, she would float down the aisles on her head-wings of immaculate white, looking down at our efforts. I was always intensely aware of her approach because her long dark blue robes would whisper against the desks, and when she leaned over my desk the chalk-laden air was enriched by whiffs of freshly baked bread and yellow bar soap... the smell of nun... a medley of aromas that filled me with nameless longing.