The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (36 page)

“Now that wasn't so hard to confess, was it? The sin of Onan is a serious matter, but at least you didn't lure some poor girl into evil ways. Tell me, Jean-Luc. Do you ever play baseball in the street outside the church?”

“Oh, no, Father, never!” I said in a wounded tone.

“No, no, I didn't think so. But there are those who do! Vandals, they are! Little heathens that don't care how much...”

When his tirade against fenestraclasts came to its muttering, tooth-grinding end, Father Looney told me to make a good Act of Contrition, and he gave me a milder penance than I had anticipated, just a little bouquet of Hail, Marys and a few Our Fathers. Masturbation was obviously a venial matter compared to breaking church windows.

As I walked home I told myself that I had been guilty of lying to a priest in the confessional, and therefore my absolution was invalid. But what choice did I have? Confess that I had dirty thoughts about a nun? I could never have made him understand that my thoughts weren't actually bad. Just mysterious and... well, loving. Sort of.

It wasn't until I was serving mass the following morning at six o'clock, and Father Looney's trembling fingers were lifting the wafer out of the chalice to place it on my tongue, that it suddenly occurred to me that I was about to take the sacred body of Christ into the unclean tabernacle of my body, knowing perfectly well that I was in a state of sin! This was worse than sin; this was sacrilege. But what could I do? Could I refuse the host, there in front of the congregation of gawking old ladies and hawking bums? For a second I considered tucking up my robe and running out of the church to avoid the eternal damnation that is the sure and just punishment for sacrilege, but Father Looney was holding the wafer out, frowning with impatience, so I opened my mouth and took it.

But I didn't swallow.

I followed Father Looney along the communion rail, holding the paten beneath the chins of the old women while the damning wafer melted against the roof of my mouth, and the heads of the spinster sisters shook in helpless pity for a soul forever lost.

My sacrilege had an unanticipated consequence: Sister Mary-Theresa never again visited my dreams to offer her cheek to mine as we levitated beneath the canopy of her wide-winged head-dress. I guess the sin of lust was scared out of me. And perhaps this was just as well because my sessions with Sister Mary-Theresa came to an end a couple of weeks later when she told me that she thought my spelling and penmanship had made sufficient progress that it was no longer necessary for us to spend an hour together after school every afternoon. Obviously she had given up on me as priest material, probably after talking to the young priest who taught the catechism classes.

I wasn't the only one visited by romance in 1941. My mother found a man who loved her. A cowboy.

A Cowboy Called Ben

In the fall of 1940 a powerfully built but hastily assembled man from out West rented one of the low-ceilinged rooms on the top floor of our building, rooms that were usually occupied by drifters passing through, or by old men, lonely, furtive and seldom seen on the street, many of whom moved out late at night to dodge paying their rent, and a few died in their rooms. They were rented 'semi-furnished', meaning a bed of sorts, a wobbly table, one or two chairs and usually one other piece of anonymous, functionless furniture that somebody had put in one of these top-floor rooms to be rid of it: a hall mirror, perhaps, or an umbrella stand, or a Victorian what-not cabinet with missing shelves and jammed drawers. The block didn't pay much attention to the transients who lived in top-floor rooms because they weren't really part of our society, but this new young man from the West, whom everyone called Ben (but whose last name no one knew) turned out to be a more permanent resident. He got a job on the loading dock of the brewery, where he worked hard and kept to himself. But the men of our block were suspicious of him when they discovered something about him that, in their view, was strange, even unnatural: Ben didn't drink. He never pinched the odd quart bottle of ale and drank it out behind the boiler room, like the other loaders did. Easy-to-steal beer was a perquisite for the Pearl Street men who did two- or three-month stints on the loading dock before getting fired for loafing or for bad-mouthing the boss. Work on the loading dock was 'casual', meaning that you got paid cash-in-hand at the end of each working day and no records were kept. The work was hard and the pay low, but the Welfare couldn't check up on you and dock your ADC payment because you were making money on the side.

In addition to his suspicious abstemiousness, Ben was an object of curiosity and conjecture because of his Sunday suit. He worked six days a week, doing as much overtime as he could get. On his way back from the brewery each evening he bought something at Mr Kane's that he could heat up on his gas ring for supper, so no one saw anything of him except on Sundays when he would emerge at about ten in the morning, freshly bathed and shaved and wearing a double-breasted suit of that hairy, acid-green material you saw nowhere but in South Street's 'barrel shops' that hung suits, trousers, dresses and coats from rope lines out in front of the store, watched over by a merchant who didn't bother to rise from his kitchen chair tipped back against the door frame when a customer was sniffing around, and whose only gesture towards salesmanship was a shrug and an ironic 'it's you, lady, believe me' or a factual 'you ain't going to find cheaper'. These establishments were called barrel shops because in the past hogshead barrels had been provided so people could change their clothing with a modicum of modesty, but by the time we lived in Albany the barrels had been replaced by small canvas-walled cubicles at the back of the shop. There were three such shops in a row, all displaying similar merchandise and run by men who could have been brothers. Perhaps they were. The clothing was bright, even garish, in keeping with the widely held tenet that the poor have a natural proclivity for the riotous and the gaudy. When Ben appeared at the top of our stoop every Sunday morning, his acid-green suit would have caused comment in itself, but he added dissonant elements that lent his ensemble a slapstick note. His suit was capped off by a wide-brimmed, pearl-gray Stetson, and he wore a pair of ornately tooled cowboy boots. He would stand for a moment at the top of the stoop looking shyly proud of his Sunday best, then he would descend and walk south on Pearl Street towards downtown, his broad shoulders tight within a suit jacket with a long back flap that made him look as though he were two-thirds torso and only one-third stubby legs. His upper body rocked and his shoulders dipped with each step; his fists were jammed deep into his pockets, bulging them out; and one trouser leg, if not both, was always hung up on the top of a cowboy boot. There was something ungainly about his walk, too, as though he had to remind himself to swing his right arm as he stepped out with his left leg, and he didn't always get that just right.

He wouldn't return until after dark. If anyone was out on the stoop, he would greet them in passing by touching the brim of his Stetson with two fingers, but he never said a word.

One Sunday morning during a glorious October Indian summer we were sitting out on the front steps to catch a little of that ephemeral sunshine, when Ben appeared at the top of the stoop. After his usual moment of showing himself with shy pride, he walked down past us, careful to leave lots of space, touched the brim of his Stetson as he passed Mother, and went down the street with his lurching walk. My mother looked after him and shook her head helplessly. “Poor guy. Not what you'd call graceful. From behind, he looks like two dogs fighting in a gunnysack. And that suit!” I couldn't help thinking of her bright blue 'Bette Davis' outfit that could be seen—perhaps even heard—from a block away. “Now, your father... he wouldn't have been caught dead in a suit like that.”

Anne-Marie and I exchanged glances. Except for the night she was mired so deeply in the blues that she broke down and wept, this was the first time she had mentioned our father since she had snatched down the green crepe paper chain he had hung around our kitchen. Her voice oddly softened by memory, Mother went on to say that, irresponsible bastard though he was, you had to hand it to him on one count: he was a classy dresser. Always looked like he'd just stepped out of a bandbox. You felt proud to be in his company. All the women said he was a classy dresser. And a good dancer, too.

She turned to me. “You're going to be a classy dresser too, Jean-Luc. You've got a lot of your father's strut.”

In one way I wasn't surprised that Mother saw some similarities between me and my father: over the years, my role had slowly shifted from that of son to that of helper and confidant. The money my paper route contributed to our income was even more important now that Lend-Lease had opened new markets for American farm products, and this reduced the agricultural excess available down at the surplus food warehouse. I guess it was partly because of Mother's dependence on the money from my paper route and partly because she couldn't have taken on tending the furnace and cleaning the halls without me to share the work and to take it over when she was ill, that I found myself promoted to the management level of our family. Problems were discussed and plans for the future made between Mother and me after Anne-Marie was asleep. These plans usually involved my leaving school and getting a job at the age of sixteen, when I would be dropped from the Welfare roles, but we still clung to our old daydream of my becoming a university professor in some small college up-state, or a doctor specializing in some non-contact, bloodless, pus-less, puke-less, piss-less branch of medicine, although just how I was going to get into medical school after leaving school at sixteen was not exactly clear.

We had returned to the front stoop after supper to enjoy the last of the Indian summer sun when Ben came back up the street, fists crammed into pockets, open suit jacket swinging behind, one trouser leg hooked up on a cowboy boot. He touched the brim of his Stetson to Mother, carefully stepped over Anne-Marie who was dozing with her head in Mother's lap, and disappeared into the building. Mother looked after him and shook her head again over his total lack of dress sense. This must have returned her thoughts to my father because after a silence she asked, “Jean-Luc? Do you feel bad about not having a father?”

I didn't answer, just shrugged and pushed out my lower lip. Like most kids, I was uncomfortable when my mother assumed a serious tone and I knew that if I said the wrong thing I might offend her or make whatever was troubling her worse. We had recently had to stop Anne-Marie's tap-dancing lessons 'for the time being', and Mother had grimly predicted that it would be just our rotten luck if the Hollywood talent scouts descended on Miss LaMonte's studio when Anne-Marie wasn't there to be discovered.

“I know that Anne-Marie misses having a father,” Mother said, caressing my sister's sleeping face. “She needs someone to do things for her, someone to cheer her on. Oh, I know you go to her recitals and all, but a brother isn't a father. Fathers are special to girls, like mothers are to boys.” She slipped her fingers into my hair, “...my good right hand.”

Oh-oh, it's good right hand time again. And I immediately felt ashamed of this disloyal thought. I stood up and rubbed my upper arms like I was getting cold, and we all went inside.

I first spoke to Ben late one evening about a month later. The year's first snow had fallen, a slushy snow gray with soot that everyone tracked into the hallway and up the stairs, where it melted into the dents and cracks of the ancient linoleum. Mrs Hanrahan had come down from her fourth-floor rear apartment to scratch on our door (she scratched on doors, rather than knocked) and complain that the halls ought to be mopped right now, so someone didn't slip and break a hip.

About an hour later I had worked my way up to the top floor with the mop and bucket. I had long nourished a fantasy about having one of those top-floor rooms all to myself someday. I fantasized coming home to my own private nest from some office job I would land when I left school at sixteen. Maybe a job on a newspaper, since I was already in the newspaper business... if only at the delivery end. I would start out as a copy boy, and somehow that would lead to my stumbling upon a major 'scoop', which quickly made me a valued reporter, which developed into my having my name over a column in which I told everybody what I thought about everything, and this, of course, led to my writing books in the same vein, which soon made me a rich and famous author... and there she is, ladies and gentlemen, docked outside our window, all her flags fluttering in the breeze. Our ship! Yeowzah, yeowzah, yeowzah!

I recognized that to dream about having a little room of my own indicated a desire to get away from my mother, but I didn't see much harm to it. It was, after all, only a daydream. And I'd be in the same building, so if she got sick or anything went wrong, I could be down there in a flash to help her wring out the wash or to apply mustard plasters. Once I had the room, I would nick books out of the library (mostly encyclopedias and atlases with big, highly detailed maps) that I would keep in a bookcase along the wall, and from these I would learn all the useful things I wrote in my newspaper column and books. Above all, I'd have a radio all my own, one that received short-wave broadcasts from all over the world so I'd know about everything, like Mr. Kane did.

I was mentally furnishing my room and my future life as I mopped the top hallway, working by feel in the dark (the lightbulb had burned out), when I heard music from the room that belonged to Cowboy Ben. He was plucking some instrument, picking out what sounded like a Mexican melody. I stopped mopping so as not to disturb him, and I stood in the dark hall, listening. The plucking stopped and his door was snatched open. “What do you think you're...! Oh, it's you. How's it going, ol' buddy?”