The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (46 page)

But Mrs McGivney didn't go to Poughkeepsie. By the end of the week she was back in her apartment. A few weeks later, close to Christmas, I was coming through the back alley late one evening and I glanced up. My heart almost stopped when I saw Mr McGivney in his usual place behind the lace curtains, his silhouette dimly halo'd by nacreous gaslight. I gasped. But how...? No, wait a minute. It wasn't Mr McGivney; it was his wife. She was sitting in his straight-backed chair, looking out just like he used to. Had she taken over his responsibility for keeping an eye on the alley? Did she sometimes brush her hair with his brush?

I wondered why anyone would spend time looking out at a deserted alley. What was the point? Then I thought about myself sitting on the edge of my daybed late into every night with my Hudson Bay around my shoulders, looking out at the empty street. Watching what? Expecting what? Fearing what?

Over the next couple of weeks, people on the block often glanced up uneasily towards Mrs McGivney's floor as they passed 232, and they would pull their necks into their collars and shudder. The superstitious Irish of North Pearl Street did not want to be reminded of Death, nor were they comforted when Mrs Kane (the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, born with a caul over her face) assured her gossip clique that bad things always come in threes. And sure enough...

Old Joe Meehan, who was mate, father, grandfather, brother, uncle or several of the above to everyone in that inbred tangle, hadn't been seen on the street for a while, and the rumor was that he was lying on a mattress somewhere in the Meehan warren, sick and abandoned. It was after midnight and I was dozing at my window when suddenly a door across the street burst open and slammed against the side of the building with enough force to shatter its window. Old Joe came lurching down the stoop wearing dirty, slack-knee'd longjohns and a red knitted cap with a tassel. He was barefoot, and his toes looked like crooked claws. He staggered down the deserted street and stood on the edge of a cone of light from the streetlamp, the tassel of his cap swinging before his eye, one foot rooted in place, the other shifting back and forth to keep his balance as he glared angrily up into the starless city sky. He reached a long bony arm up into the shaft of light and shook his fist. “Screw ya!” he croaked. “You hear what I'm sayin'? This is Joseph Michael Meehan saying: Screw ya! And screw all the angels and archangels too, while you're at it!” He stumbled over to the gutter and sat down heavily on the curb, his elbows on his knees and his palms pressed into his eye sockets. Lights came on in a nearby apartment and a head peeked through curtains, but no one had any intention of getting mixed up in a Meehan brawl, especially a brawl between Old Joe and God. When I looked back, Old Joe had slumped over and was lying on his side with his butt overhanging the gutter, his knees up to his chest and his cheek on his palm, like a kid. Two of the Meehan men came out and tried to pick him up, but they couldn't, not because he resisted, but because he was so limp that his body kept slumping through their arms and folding up between their legs. With his trap-door longjohns and his tasseled cap, Old Joe was a figure of slapstick comedy, a Mack Sennett gag. A sad one.

I watched until the ambulance came and collected the body about an hour later. The next day, people who passed would glance angrily from Mrs McGivney's windows across to the Meehans', annoyed to be reminded of Death a second time. Our block worried about death the way richer neighborhoods worried about burglars and vandals and child snatchers. Pearl Street's children were already in the hands of street forces; we had nothing to interest burglars; and anything worth vandalizing we had already vandalized ourselves. All we had was our lives, and therefore we worried a lot about death. Death had visited our block twice now, and everyone remembered Mrs Kane's prediction that bad luck always comes in threes, so they held their breaths until Mrs Kane was told by a women who had her tea leaves read regularly (just in case) that her aunt in Cohose had slipped in her bathroom and bruised her knee badly. “There it is!” Mrs Kane pronounced triumphantly. “What did I tell you? The third fatality!” When one of the women had the temerity to mention that Cohose was a long way from Pearl Street, and that a bruised knee, even a badly bruised one, didn't really qualify as a fatality, Mrs Kane shook her head ruefully and reminded her that Fate doesn't always conform to human expectations. If it did, what need would people have for someone who was born with a caul over her face and therefore had the gift of being able to see the future in the bottom of a teacup?

In addition to the service banners hanging in our windows, the ration stamps and disks cluttering up the bottom of handbags, and the new steel pennies that replaced copper ones in 1943 because copper was needed in wartime production, the war brought us those scrap-metal drives to which kids contributed by breaking into scrap yards and stealing stuff they had previously contributed, and contributing it again. The war also made itself felt in 'shortages' that caused us to save waste paper and used cooking fat, and to flatten tin cans, until trucks came around to collect them. Because the rubber plantations of southeast Asia were in Japanese hands, it was impossible to buy a new tire for a bike or a wagon unless you 'knew somebody'; and silk stockings had disappeared from the shops because silk was needed for parachutes, so young women shaved their legs closely, dyed them a light tan, and got a girlfriend to draw lines up the back of their calves to simulate the seams of stockings. Entrepreneurs quickly rushed into the market with expensive 'silk stocking' dyes and 'Seams Real' marker pencils specifically designed for this patriotic purpose, but the thrifty young women of North Pearl Street made do with diluted iodine or walnut oil for dye and eyebrow pencils for the seam line.

Lucky Strike cigarettes wrung every drop of advertising advantage out of their new white package by claiming that the green dye they had previously used had been requisitioned for the war effort. “Lucky Strike Green Goes to War!” declared the radio announcers in strident, courageous voices, as though the tobacco company was sacrificing itself to rid the world of the Nazi scourge, and so our boys might come back safe and well.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note56#note56” ??[56]?

Despite her worries about Ben and the pressure of wartime inflation that tightened our budget with every passing week, Mother still managed to be fun. Sometimes she would push the furniture to the edges of the middle room and show us the Charleston, the Varsity Drag, the Bunny Hug, the Turkey Trot or the Castle Walk.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note57#note57” ??[57]? She was a natural performer who blossomed under appreciation and applause. She taught Anne-Marie how to do the Jackson Strut, which they would perform together, side by side, with me as the clapping, whistling audience.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note58#note58” ??[58]?

After the early panic, patriotism, paranoia and profiteering passed, America accepted war as the natural state of things with surprising equanimity. In my routine of school, homework, the paper route and radio-listening there was little time for the story games that had sustained my early years on North Pearl, and I assumed that I had outgrown the need for them. Without these games, I had the long Saturday afternoons free after I returned, tight-stomached, from often confrontational and never totally successful collection rounds. I often spent Saturday afternoons watching movies at the Strand Theater, because I had worked out how to sneak in through a second-balcony fire door. This involved slipping down a narrow, slimy alley clogged with dented garbage cans to the back of the theater, where, unseen, I would scale its brick wall, which had a decorative recessed course every two feet and was therefore suitable to my felonious purposes. I would work my long, dicey way up to the third-story level, blowing and panting with effort and fear, but maintaining purchase on the gritty brick with just my fingertips and the tips of my tennis shoes, careful not to look down lest the view of the ground far below chill my stomach and make my hands go weak. When I reached the level of a big cantilevered iron fire escape I paused to build up the courage (actually it was more desperation than courage) to release my trembling fingertip grip on the edge of the brick and grasp the bottom step of the fire escape, which I would 'ride' back down to the level of the alley, always careful to keep it from banging on the cement and alerting ushers whose sole purpose in life was to deny me the enjoyment and enlightenment of the movies just because I didn't have the money for a ticket. Now the dangerous part was over and the tricky part began. I would slowly mount the fire escape to the point at which my weight was insufficient to hold it down against the counterweights that normally kept it up out of the reach of larcenous brats trying to sneak into the movies. As the stairs started rising, I would inch back down to control the speed of ascent, ultimately finding a balance point at which I could make them rise slowly and silently by shifting my weight back and forth. When finally I managed to coax the fire escape back up in place without clanging hard against the wall and warning the ushers within, I began the third phase of the complex Rififi heist film machinations I went through every Saturday to save fifteen cents. With the twelve-inch ruler I had taped to my leg, I tripped the latch of the heavy metal door which had no outside handle, because it was a press-bar fire door. Taking several deep breaths to ready myself, I would snatch the door open, enter the curtained-off exit niche of the second balcony, then close the door quickly/softly behind me, hoping that the flash of daylight around the edges of the curtain hadn't alerted ushers down on the first floor; but they had their hands full with the mob of chattering, whistling, hooting, foot-stamping kids impatiently awaiting the beginning of the show. The balconies were always empty and roped off during these afternoon performances because... well, what theater manager in his right mind would let a street kid sit in the front row of a balcony with a paper cup of soda in his hand and a sea of vulnerable heads beneath him? I accomplished the move from the empty second balcony to the anonymity of the crowded orchestra by first going down to the mezzanine where the toilets were. When the coast was clear, I would slip into the men's room, where I would stand at the trough with my pecker out, looking down at the sodden cigarette butts until a couple of kids came in together, then I would mime shaking off and I'd wash my hands carefully, wasting time until they were through and I could descend with them, smiling and asking them questions about the movies we were going to see, so it looked to the ever-vigilant ushers like we were all chums together.

When I didn't go to the movies on Saturday afternoon because it was raining or snowing and the brick wall was too slippery and dangerous, or because something was playing that I didn't care to see, like a romantic film, or a musical, or anything by Disney, I would spend my afternoon in the library. At the age of twelve, I received an adult card that permitted me to take out anything I pleased; but I missed the adventure of sneaking up the iron spiral staircase from the basement children's library to my cozy niche above the gurgling Gothic radiator where I had sat in the light of the stained-glass window and read books I had nicked from the return carts. One rainy afternoon after I had my adult card I thought about how pleasant it used to be, reading in that warm niche while rain running down the windows caused rivulets of colored shadow to ripple over my page, so I brought a book to my old nest in the hope of recapturing the zest of those stolen hours, but I couldn't concentrate because I was afraid that someone might find me there, and I would look like an ass, hiding away to read what I had every right to check out and read, now that I had an adult card. I guess it's true that you can't go home again. Each moment has its place in the flow of time, then the moment passes, and if you reach back for it, you come up with a handful of dust.

Ben's appearance on the scene had let me ease myself out of the center of our tight little family. Except for routine responsibilities like my paper route and household chores, I was free to drift on the edges of my mother's life, and she didn't seem to miss me. But after Ben was shipped overseas, she began to slip into 'the blues' more often and more deeply than before she met him. Almost every evening she would sit at the kitchen table after supper, writing to him, while Anne-Marie and I did the supper dishes. She always used V-Mail, those one-page letters that folded up to become their own envelope and didn't require a stamp if addressed to someone in the armed forces, and she made up for the lack of space by writing in a small, tight hand that must have cramped and crispened what she said.

The winter of 1942-43 came early, cold and hard, the first heavy snows falling in mid-November. Restrictions on coal meant that I had to bank the furnace at nine o'clock every night, and the building became chilly enough that you could see your breath by the time I went down to the basement to stoke it up again the next morning at four-thirty, before starting my paper round. As the first year of the war came to its end, the excitement and newness faded into grim routine, and people began to wonder how long these shortages and high prices would last. The regular stream of Ben's letters from England suddenly stopped, and Mother became preoccupied and tetchy. Then the radio announced the landing of American forces on the shores of French colonial North Africa, and she felt sure Ben was among them. She confessed to me that she had a premonition that something terrible had happened to him. She could feel it in her bones. It turned out she was right.