The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (41 page)

I felt like an ass to have let Tonio con me, and I resolved to make up for it by giving her something really splendid for Christmas.

When Ben and Anne-Marie returned from cleaning up the broken dishes, I could tell that my sister was bursting with a secret. Ben exchanged a look with Mother, who smiled almost bashfully, then he asked me to come into the kitchen; he had something to tell me.

The four of us sat at the table with the quarter of an apple pie left over from my welcome-home party in the middle of the oilcloth. Mother and Anne-Marie watched me to see how I would take the news as Ben told me that he and Mother intended to get married. Then he would be our dad. How'd that be?

How would that be?

Ben was offering to assume my responsibility for Mother!

How would that be? I was free! But of course I didn't let myself express this disloyal joy. I pulled a thoughtful frown and asked when they were planning to get married.

“As soon as your mother can get a divorce.”

Mother explained that in New York a woman seeking a divorce on the grounds of desertion—the only grounds available in her case—wasn't considered well and truly 'deserted' until seven years passed without her receiving a word from her vanished husband. It had been almost five and a half years since my father failed to show up with his green cake, so the soonest she and Ben could marry would be the spring of 1943.

Born worrier that I was, and possessed of a unique gift for finding the gray cloud at the center of every silver lining, I immediately realized that if we got another letter out of the blue from my father—and this had happened twice before—then all bets were off; there could be no divorce on the grounds of desertion. When I could repress this anxious thought, I felt a mixture of joy and guilt at the prospect of their marriage. Joy because I liked Ben and admired his gentle Western, can-do masculinity; and guilt because I was shifting my burden to him. I felt like a rat, and like something worse than a rat for thinking of my Mother as a burden, when she never thought of us kids that way. But then... they were grown-ups, and that's what grown-ups were for: taking care of kids.

Overnight our lives became brighter. With Ben we had plans, hopes, a future.

Our ship had come in: the SS Ben!

The summer of 1941 came to an end, and I returned to Our Lady of Angels where I occasionally met Sister Mary-Theresa in the halls. Once she told me that Sister Mary-Joseph, my social studies teacher, had described me as the best student she had ever had, despite the disturbing communist views I advanced in every essay question. In defense, I explained that Sister Mary-Joseph didn't know the difference between a socialist and a communist. “She's nice enough, but you have to admit that she's not the brightest bride in Christ's chaste harem.” (A phrase I had worked up while doodling at the back of Sister Mary-Joseph's class.) She compressed her lips and looked at me reprovingly over the tops of the glasses she had recently begun wearing. I smiled. Then she smiled too, then shook her head in admonition... of both of us. As we stood there in the window bay, I was aware of her characteristic aroma of yellow bar soap and starch. From the first, I had associated the smell of starch that followed her with the delicious aroma of fresh bread. Now I knew it was only the starch that stiffened the wings of her wimple. Wearing glasses, she seemed more teacherly, less womanly. The flames of my pre-adolescent desire had cooled and I was seeing her with cruelly honest eyes, seeing her as she was, an imperfect thing. I felt a little sorry for myself. As you see, I was becoming a young male.

While chatting one evening, Mother and Ben hatched the idea of someday building a nice little tourist camp somewhere in the West... Wyoming, maybe. Typically, they soon elevated this casual fantasy into a grand life-plan, a dream upon which their future happiness would depend. Ben would build snug little tourist cabins out of varnished logs, beginning with just six units and adding more as the tourist camp prospered through word of mouth, which would spread the news of its down-home charm and reasonable prices. Throughout that autumn they spent almost every evening at the kitchen table, weaving and embroidering this dream, trying to make it real by sheer force of wanting it so much. They drew sketches of the little log cabins surrounding a 'frontier-style' cafe-cum-office-cum-general store with living quarters for the four of us above. They furnished and equipped the cabins and the cafe down to the smallest detail from the Montgomery Ward catalogue which, like most Americans of the era, they called the Monkey Ward Dream Book, choosing furniture, blankets, curtains, cutlery, dishes, wall art, bathroom equipment—even the seeds and bulbs for the little flower gardens that would lend each cabin its special cachet: Pansy Cabin, Marigold Cabin, Tulip Cabin... that sort of thing. Choosing specific things and making long detailed lists lent the heft of reality to their dreams. Mother always chose the 'Best' line from the catalogue's options of Good, Better and Best, because, she explained, quality goods are the least expensive in the long run. And anyway, she'd had it up to here with shrimping and saving and making do with cheap trash. Ben would build everything with his own hands, the cabins, the fencing, the general store-cum-cafe, even the rustic archway entrance from which would hang a sign with a Double-R-Bar brand burnt into it. (Ben was known to his cowboy friends as 'Red', and my mother's name was Ruby.) Ben would also run a small herd of high-value breeding stock on the side; while Mother, with her experience as a waitress, would operate the cafe year-round, so between them they would bring in some income even during the off-season. Well-off guests from the East seeking a real Western experience would come swarming in, eager to stay in a clean, authentic, ranch-style, log-cabin tourist camp run by such honest, friendly people. Mother and Ben filled a notebook with things they would need, together with their catalogue numbers and prices, all carefully totaled up.

I used to sit with them at the kitchen table, tossing in occasional ideas and enjoying the atmosphere of eager, hopeful planning for our future. But Anne-Marie would often slip away to the back bedroom to read or design fashions for her demanding paper-doll movie stars. She fell asleep early and was hard to waken in the morning, a sure sign that she was troubled. One Sunday evening after a long planning session at the kitchen table, Mother and Ben decided to take a walk to get the cricks out of their backs. I went into the kitchen for a glass of water and found Anne-Marie sitting there, looking glumly at the Montgomery Ward catalogue lying open to a page of pots and pans they had been selecting for the cafe's kitchen.

As I ran the water to get it cool, I glanced over and noticed that Anne-Marie's eyes were brimming with tears.

“What's the matter?”

She shook her head, not daring to speak because her tears were too close to the surface.

“You've been down in the dumps lately. Are you sick?”

She turned her face away.

Always embarrassed and uncertain of what to do when she was in a fragile mood, I drank my water and went back to the book I was reading in my daybed. I was absorbed in it when I felt her presence behind me in the doorway.

“...what about me?” she said, her voice wobbly.

I set down my book. “What about you?”

“I want to dance. Or be a costume designer, maybe.”

“And?”

“That used to be what we all wanted. But now...” Her voice caught, and she had to clear her throat to go on. “We never talk about my dancing any more. Now it's always these tourist cabins, and how Mom will run the cafe and pick out the decorations, and how Ben will build everything and have cows and all, and how you'll have smart ideas and keep the books and all... but what about me?”

“There's lots of things you can do. You can help Mom, and... plenty of things.”

“Make the beds and wait on table?”

It hadn't occurred to me that this new phantom ship of ours had no place in the crew for an all-singing, all-dancing costume designer to the stars, nor had I been aware of how much Anne-Marie felt left out. Brothers are like that. They love, but they're dense and self-concerned.

“Don't worry about it,” I said with the breezy confidence of the un-threatened. “You'll be able to take dancing lessons out there.”

“In the middle of Wyoming? How often do talent scouts check out tourist camps when they're looking for new movie stars?” She blinked, and a tear ran down each of her cheeks.

I reached out and took her hand. “Oh, we'll get away, you and me. Just you wait and see. One of these days, I'll get away to some college and become a scientist, and you'll get to California and end up...”

But she was shaking her head fatalistically. “I have a feeling I'll never get away. You'll get away, sure. But not me.”

“I wouldn't leave you behind.”

“Yes, you will.” She said this without rancor, a simple statement of fact. “One of these days, you'll just up and run away.”

“I never would!”

She looked at me levelly for a moment. “Yes, you will. You'll run away.”

And I knew she was right. One of these days, I would just walk away.

I squeezed her hand to say I was sorry, but she pulled away and left for her bedroom, where Mother would find her in that comatose sleep she fell into when she needed to find peace.

Their dream of those Double-R-Bar Ranch Cabins in Wyoming would be the first of many Ships-Coming-in that Mother and Ben would conceive, plan, and even venture into over the years, all of which would fail for lack of realistic analysis and adequate resources—doomed Titanics, every one.

Thanks to Ben's generosity, and maybe his sensitivity for Anne-Marie's feelings of being left out, she was soon taking tap-dancing lessons again, and even a brother had to admit she was getting prettier every month. With her pleasing singing voice, outgoing personality, and the thick, long blonde hair that Mother tormented with a curling iron until it was a mass of sausage curls, she was sure to replace Shirley Temple, when the time came. And, as Mother never tired of reminding us, Shirley couldn't stay young forever. Anne-Marie made rapid progress and soon was chosen by Miss LaMonte to appear with her at smokers, men's clubs and occasional wedding suppers. For each of these night performances, Anne-Marie earned a hypothetical three dollars which Miss LaMonte applied to her lessons. But still Anne-Marie always went vacant-eyed and elsewhere-minded when Mother and Ben talked about their tourist camp. Her dreams and fantasies were all about backstage excitement and flashing marquees and audiences buzzing with anticipation, none of which were consonant with plans to bury the family in some quaint roadside place out in the infinite spaces of the high chaparral.

An old hand at escapist story games, I recognized this Tourist-Camp-in-the-West for what it was: an analgesic fantasy; and I was worried when Mother and Ben behaved as though it was not only real, but practical, indeed all but inevitable. I intuitively knew better. The only place things worked out that way was in the movies.

The year 1941 had been a busy and fraught time for me. I had become acquainted with Brigid Meehan's left breast and fallen in love with Sister Mary-Theresa; circumstances had trapped me into the sacrilege of taking the transubstantiated body of Christ into a sinful mouth; the summer had brought me my first vacation, an experience I never wanted to repeat; and in the fall I had learned that Ben was going to become my stepfather. And through it all, Hitler's war was a storm growling on the eastern horizon.

And 1941 wasn't through with me yet, for on December 7th the Japanese Empire declared war on North Pearl Street.

North Pearl Street Goes to War

Stashing away a dime here and a nickel there, by Thanksgiving of 1941 I had managed to save enough from my paper route to buy my mother a really nice Christmas present to make up for the three boxes of Mason jars full of tomatoes which still sat on top of her wardrobe in silent accusation. This present had to fulfill two criteria: it must be truly splendid and glorious, and it must cost less than five dollars. To be able to pounce when I found the perfect thing, I carried the five dollars I had saved up in my shoe whenever I was wandering around the city, as I did often, now that I had relegated to 'kids' stuff' the complex story games that had occupied so much of my free time when I was younger.

One Saturday afternoon I was peering into one of the 'Aladdin's Cave' junk shops that had sprung up in previously abandoned stores along South Street. The windows had been soaped over on the inside, then the soap had been rubbed off in small rectangles and circles randomly placed here and there so the passerby could peek in and see what was on offer... a clever device for attracting the curious. There was a sign above the door bearing the disarmingly frank statement: We Buy Junk/We Sell Antiques. Craning my neck to look through one of the cleared circles at the used goods, factory seconds and odd lots of unsold merchandise, I spied something interesting among the things piled higgledy-piggledy on rough plywood tables: an open cigar box containing a dozen or so of the 'riffle books' I had begun collecting several years before. These palm-sized books had simple stories, usually something corny, like Betty Boop telling some ogling guy that he could go jump in the lake, and when you turned the booklet over and riffled the pages with your thumb, you saw the man jump into a lake with a big splash of exclamation points! As far as I could tell from my oblique view, none of the riffle books in the cigar box was a duplicate of any in my collection, so I went in to see if I could afford to buy one or two of them. The place was filled with junk of all descriptions, the ejecta of a hundred attics and closets. At first it seemed that there was no one around to serve customers, then an old guy with mussed-up hair sat up from a cot where he had been napping between two overburdened tables, and he asked what he could show me. I said I was just looking around, and he said, “Be my guest, kid. Looking is free. Stealing, on the other hand, is not free. It is a crime. Breaking stuff is not a crime, but it's a mistake, because you got to pay for anything you break.”