The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (37 page)

“I was just mopping the floor,” I said. “I'm sorry if the noise disturbed you.”

He smiled. “It wasn't the noise. It was the sudden silence when you stopped mopping that disturbed me.”

I knew exactly what he meant, but I thought I was the only one who 'heard' things like sudden silences or 'saw' things like nobody being where there ought to be somebody. I never gave this sense of negative perception a name, but I had always felt it.

“It's nice... I mean... your, ah...”

“It's called a mandolin. Come on in.”

I followed him in. “It's a kind of guitar, isn't it?”

“No, not really. Guitars are mostly for chording and rhythm. You carry a melody on a mandolin. See how it's double-strung?” He held out the instrument, but I couldn't see much with the only light coming from behind him. “You pluck between the two strings to sustain a note and you... well, fact is, I'm just learning myself. I bought a book on how to play the mandolin after I found this thing in a hockshop in St. Louis.”

The table behind him was strewn with manuals and complicated schematics that I would later discover were for radio receivers. He had recently taken up amateur short-wave radio as a hobby. That's where he went on his Sunday outings, to a ham radio club where people sat around and talked about sideboards and superheterodynes and stuff like that. I wonder what his fellow radio hams thought about the cowboy boots, the Stetson and the green suit.

I was interested in the complicated-looking schematics, and I could tell that he was hungry for conversation by the way he had volunteered information about his mandolin; but I still had a couple of pages of penmanship to do for Sister Mary-Theresa in my best imitation of her round Palmer hand, using the fountain pen she had given me, so I told him that I had to be getting back downstairs. He said, “Okay. See you around, ol' buddy,” and closed his door behind me.

In November Mussolini invaded Greece, but his incompetent generals and half-hearted troops soon got tangled in the mountains and came to grief. That same month, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia joined the Axis, as Bulgaria would do four months later.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note39#note39” ??[39]?

The winter of 1940-41 was long and cold. I would arrive at school with chapped cheeks and frozen ears after rushing through my predawn paper route then climbing back up the Livingston Avenue hill to Our Lady of Angels school, where the over-heated classrooms and un-challenging schoolwork soon lulled me into dozing and daydreaming. I filled the time imprisoned at my desk with story games, a new favorite being the development of an 'unbreakable' code that I intended to offer to the American army and navy because everyone was saying that war with Germany was inevitable, although the Irish on our block said they'd be goddamned if they'd fight alongside the English.

In the evening, I sat with my mother and Anne-Marie in front of our Emerson, listening to hissing short-wave broadcasts by Edward R. Murrow from London. We could hear the crump of bombs dropping in the background, and we knew that the blitz was happening right then. At that very moment! It was America's first experience with war as a live media event, and it was impressive. And chilling, too.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note40#note40” ??[40]?

I only saw Ben occasionally over the months when I was weaving my delightful, if sinful, love fantasies involving Sister Mary-Theresa, but when we happened to pass in the hall or on the street, he would always say, “How's it going there, partner?” which sounded cowboy enough to please me.

That early slushy snow was followed by one of the coldest winters on record. The Hudson froze over, and two boys from Troy were drowned when they tried to walk across and fell through the thin center ice. (Who but a kid from Troy would try a stupid stunt like that, I ask you?) It was after midnight and I was reading in my daybed, my Hudson Bay blanket around me, when I noticed that double cones of mist came from my nose when I breathed out. The room had grown cold. Something must be wrong with the old boiler... again. Since heat was included in the price of rent, everyone in the building complained if the radiators weren't hissing and thumping with hot water from September 15 to March 15, regardless of the weather. Every winter morning before setting off on my paper route, I had to shake down the ashes then carefully pile a little coal on the remaining embers, then when the smoke from the pile thickened and caught with a little puff, I would put on a few more lumps of coal, and when they in turn caught, a full load that would last until noon. Sometimes I would find that the fire had gone out during the night, and I'd have to start a fresh one using broken-up orange crates for kindling. This always took more time than I had allotted for morning chores and made me late for my paper round, which in turn made me late for school. Most frustrating were those times when a big fused clinker would get caught in the grating while I was shaking down the ashes, and I would have to throw my body weight against the shaker handle in an effort to break the clinker up, often bruising my shoulder on the iron bar. I was obliged to open the fire door and bang around in the embers and ashes with the shaker handle to break up the clinker, raising clouds of ash and smoke and inevitably putting out the last lingering embers while getting myself filthy with ash and coal dust, then having to start the fire from scratch, and being late for school yet again, Goddamnit to hell! ('Jeez' had, by this time, been relegated to those childhood years when I had been innocent enough to imagine that God didn't know it was a euphemistic variant of Jesus.)

For a while I lay there breathing out jets of mist, hoping the furnace would start working again of its own volition. But it wasn't long before Mrs Hanrahan up in fourth-floor rear expressed her displeasure by banging her radiator with her slipper, waking up the rest of the apartment house on the jungle telegraph of our pipes. Mother came staggering out of the bedroom she shared with Anne-Marie, tying her robe about her, but when we got down to the boiler room and turned on the naked overhead bulb we found that the fire was burning just fine, and there was pressure in the system... too much pressure, in fact! Steam was escaping from the safety petcock in a screaming jet! We fumbled around, trying this and that, touching hot things and snapping our fingers to keep the burn from hurting, but all to no avail! And Mrs Hanrahan kept up her angry Morse of complaint until my mother's short-fused temper snapped and she went charging up five flights of stairs to engage in a shouting match through Mrs Hanrahan's door, which the old lady didn't dare open because Mother's French-'n'-Indian rages were well known on the block. While this was going on, I rushed up to our apartment, filled a bucket with water from our tub and brought it slopping down the narrow, unlit basement stairs to fling it into the roaring mouth of the furnace because the needle on the boiler gauge had pegged at the top of the red danger area, and I was sure it would blow up at any moment. I emptied the bucket into the fire but it had no effect on the roaring flames. (Oh, sure! But the damn fire would go out just like that in the mornings, when I was trying to revive it!) I dashed back up the stairs for more water. Even in these dangerous circumstances when I feared the boiler would blow up in my face, and even though my teeth were chattering because my pajamas were drenched with slopped water, I couldn't help making a story game of it, muttering to my frightened comrades, telling them that we must save this military base from sabotage by the dirty Storm Troopers. You can imagine my embarrassment when, making my way down the dark stairs with a second brimful, slopping bucket of water as I issued orders and encouragement to my followers and growled defiant threats to the Nazis lurking down in the coal bunker, I ran into someone in the passage. No possibility here of converting my theatrical muttering into song, so I tried profanity. The stranger was Ben, who had come down from his top-floor room. He took my bucket and preceded me down to the basement, where he looked over the situation with an amused calm that won my instant admiration. (Indeed, calm amusement became the principal idiom of my manner as leader of my band for the next few games.) While Mother's angry voice filtered down from five floors up, blending with the inhaling roar of the fire within the open furnace door and the angry hiss of the steam from the petcock, Ben felt his way along the pipes until he came to an especially hot area, over which he poured the bucket of water in a slow even flow until, suddenly, there was a loud clank in the pipes, followed by a drop of the needle towards the safe green area and a sighing decrease in the force of the steam jetting from the petcock. Ben threw a couple of shovels of coal into the boiler, kicked the door closed and handed the bucket back to me.

“Well, I guess that's got her whipped,” he said. “Some sort of vapor lock, I reckon.”

I nodded gravely. Yup, that was probably it. Some sort of vapor lock. But we had her whipped. Oh sure, we were tired and wet and cold, but we'd done it, this cowboy and I. The Storm Troopers were beaten. We'd licked 'em fair 'n' square. Vapor lock.

I changed pajamas and went back to my daybed to read until I fell asleep, but from back in the kitchen I could hear the quiet voices of my mother and Ben talking over cups of coffee. A little later, a loud clank snatched me out of a doze during which I had been reading through closed eyelids—slowly, perhaps, and not absolutely clearly, but reading nonetheless. The clank was Mrs Hanrahan getting in a last wrathful word by banging on the pipes. I heard my mother threaten to go up those stairs and give that old nut a piece of her mind, but Ben's soft western burr joshed her out of her anger, saying that probably the only thing keeping the poor old biddy alive was the hate and frustrations she gnawed on like an old dog worrying a bone. That evocative image of the toothless old dog 'worrying' a bone carried me into sleep.

The following Sunday, Anne-Marie and I came home from a movie Ben had treated us to, and walked in to find him kissing our mother. All four of us blushed. But that night, as we sat around the kitchen table playing hearts (Mother and me against Ben and Anne-Marie because I was the best card player and Mother loved to win), we talked about all sorts of things. I could see that the adults didn't intend to explain anything about their feelings for each other, and that was just fine with me because I didn't want to hear about it. When it comes to making a child cringe and shudder, the idea of parents being in love comes second only to envisioning them making love.

I guess I had been right about Ben's being lonely and hungry for conversation, because during the next few evenings around our kitchen table, he responded to Anne-Marie's and my frank curiosity by telling us great stories about the years he had been on the drift after running away from an orphanage at the age of thirteen. Because he was what he called 'well-grown', he had been able to find work as a fisherman in Alaska at the age of fourteen, and later he worked as a harvest hand through the South and Midwest, as a gandy-dancer on the Great Northern Railroad up along the Canadian border, as a mechanic in the wildcat oil fields of Texas, in general construction in New England, and most interesting to me, as a cowboy in Wyoming for two years. I had the typical urban kid's image of the cowboy: Gene Autry or Roy Rogers singing as he rode into town, followed by the Sons of the Pioneers or the Riders of the Purple Sage playing their guitars from the saddle and singing in close harmony, all dressed in fancy cowboy suits with bright buttons and dangling fringe.

Before we met him, my family had shared the block's view that Ben's ridiculous Sunday get-up qualified him as 'a weird one', but when we learned that his tooled two-tone boots and his Stetson were not just quirky affectations, but came from his time as a cowboy, Anne-Marie and I were able to overlook his sartorial peculiarities, even if Mother was not. Everything else about him seemed admirable. He was kind and polite; he knew lots of jokes and hundreds of folk songs; he had a powerful sense of justice and fair play; and although almost entirely self-taught, his curiosity and his native intelligence had equipped him with most of the building skills, from carpentry and masonry to roofing, electricity and plumbing, as well as an intimate understanding of internal combustion motors. In addition, he had a vast store of odd bits of lore including a buff's hair-splitting knowledge of Civil War minutia, the ability to rattle off all the sails on a clipper-rigged schooner, the names of the presidents and vice presidents in order, and the capitals and nicknames of all forty-eight states. He was at that moment teaching himself what he believed was the coming field of employment: electronics, and he was able to pick out tunes on the Italian mandolin. All fascinating stuff for an admiring boy, but I couldn't help wondering why a man as intelligent and knowledgeable as Ben was doing brute-work on the loading dock of a brewery.

Within a week, he was eating his suppers with us, and soon after that he was also coming down to have his morning coffee with Mother before going to work, and paying her for his board. When he began coming back from the brewery at lunchtime for a sandwich and a cup of soup, the women of our block sniffed and raised their eyebrows about the goings-on over at 238.

“If I said it once, I said it a thousand times: for all her airs, that Canuck ain't no better than she ought to be.”

It was no coincidence that Ben's arrival in our lives put an end to the periodic flights from my mother that began when I ran away on my tricycle at the age of three, and included that night I ended up hanging off a railroad bridge while an engine passed inches from my face. All in all, I ran away eight or nine times.