The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (56 page)

“In the end, I turned myself in to the Feds to avoid the Mob!” He laughed so hard that he coughed pink phlegm into a wad of toilet paper and had to spend a couple of minutes sucking at his oxygen. When he could speak again, he looked across the table at me, his eyes bloodshot and his lips blue. “You know something, kid? I've spent more than half of my adult life inside. All in short two- or three-year shots.”

“If you were such a scam maven, how come you did so much time?”

“The way I see it is this. The day I was born Malicious Fate condemned me to a life sentence. But my guardian angel had connections downtown, and she arranged that I do my time on the installment plan... five years down and a couple of years each decade.” He grinned. When I didn't respond to this rehearsed bit of bitter wit, he became suddenly serious.

“Look here, kid. I asked you to come because I thought maybe you'd want to hear my side of things.”

“In fact, Ray, I don't.”

“You don't want to hear what I've got to say?”

I opened my hands in a gesture of 'whatever'.

“I'm going to be up front with you, kid. I'm a drinker. That's always been my problem. Unfortunately booze and stings don't mix. I'd have some mark all sewn up, and I'd take a drink or two to celebrate, and then I'd get the urge to make the mark look foolish. Tease and bait him. Make him do what they call in the business...”

“...take his shoe off,” I said.

“Oh... you know about that, eh? Well, I'd play the mark, just to see how far I could rub it in without tipping him off. And inevitably the booze would make me push it just a little bit too close to the edge, and the next thing you know, I'm eating rice and grease in some Dixie can. Some people never learn. They say that life is the great teacher, but that's crap. No really good teacher would give you the test before she'd taught the lesson.” Even while he was chuckling at this, he was examining me, hefting the moment, ready to make his sting. The tail end of his laugh blended into “...so, tell me, kid. Do you ever think about that Saint Patrick's Day party I threw for you and your sister in Albany?”

“Is that what you remember? Throwing a party for us?”

“I spent hours stringing up green paper through those goddamned water pipes. And there were green plates and napkins and green pop and a green cake.”

“There was no green cake.”

“Sure there was! I went out to buy one. I remember like it was yesterday.”

“You went out to buy a cake, but you never came back. The party never happened.”

“What are you saying? I remember it! I can see you kids eating the cake and drinking the pop.”

“Some people get very good at conning themselves.”

“Tell me about it. A con's got to be able to con himself, or he'll never amount to anything. The only way to build up the confidence and sincerity you need to sell some mark the Brooklyn Bridge is to believe deep in your heart that you own it. Really own it. Know what I mean, kid?”

“I really hate this 'kid' business.”

“Do you?”

“H'm.”

“Sorry. You're absolutely sure there was no party?”

I told him I was absolutely sure.

He digested this, then shrugged and said, “I'll be damned. Ah, well, you survived it. You didn't turn out so bad. Big motorcycle. Been to university. When I think of what I could have done with a university degree.”

“Why didn't you award yourself one?”

“Matter of fact, I did. A couple of times I was professor this or doctor that.” He looked at me sidewards, then his voice shifted to a huskier, more sincere timbre. “Jesus, kid, you're right. There was no Saint Patrick's Day party. No green cake. Funny how you can wish something had happened so much that you actually stash it into your memory. I went out that morning meaning to get a green cake, but the first thing you know, there I was, walking along... marks on the street corner... action in the bars... and I was free, white and stepping out. I wanted to go back to that cheap apartment, but I couldn't. I just couldn't do it, kid. I loved your mother. I really did. I love her to this day. She was a great gal. Full of life, and a heart as big as all outdoors. Did you ever see her dance? She was what you call life-embracing. That was what she was, life-embracing. And I loved you kids, too. I mean, I didn't really know you kids, but I loved the idea of you. My own kids. But... some men have just got to be free, kid. Know what I mean?”

I didn't answer. He was still looking for the right moment to run whatever graft he had in mind.

He gave me a couple more stories of his experiences on the hustle, one of which I had heard half a dozen times while I was with the shows, each story-teller claiming to have been there when it happened. (For the old carnies among my readers, it was the tale of Jimmy Straights, the bucket-game, and the Ferris wheel.)

Then, with just a hint of quiver beneath a brave, stiff-upper-lip tone, he said, “I guess you're surprised to see how low I've fallen. Living in a rat hole like this. Tied to this goddamned air bottle.”

I didn't answer. Here it came.

“Well, this is not the lowest a man can fall. There's lower. A lot lower.”

“Is that right, Ray?”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, a man can fall so low that he tries to hit up his kid... his own kid that he hasn't seen since he was a baby... for a couple of bucks to buy a bottle of cheap hooch. Now that's low.”

“It's pretty low all right.”

“But that's how low I've fallen, because I'm sitting here and I'm looking you in the eyes and I'm asking you to leave a little something on the table so your old man can get drunk tonight and forget that he's dying, forget that his lungs aren't worth a damn and that one of these days soon, he'll just stop breathing and never wake up.”

I nodded. It was a potent shot, aimed as far below the belt as he could reach. How could anyone turn down a dying drunk's last request? Turn down the man who gave you the gift of life? And this really didn't have anything to do with the money. It was all about proving to himself, and to me, that he was the real carnie, and I was just another mark.

“Well,” I said, getting up with a grunt. “I guess I'd better be going. I don't want to be in this neighborhood after dark.”

He looked at me out of the corners of his eyes. Then he chuckled. “You're tough, kid. I got to hand it to you, you are really tough. All bone and gristle where other people got heart.”

I almost said something corny, like: I learned from a master.

“Yeah,” he went on. “Look at you! Young, smart, tough and on your way to the big party I just got home from. Have fun, kid. Life's a gas.”

I nodded and left.

I was down on the street, checking my mill over to make sure the kids I'd found standing around it hadn't screwed anything up, when my father appeared at the front door of his tenement, gasping and wheezing from being disconnected from his oxygen. He tried to call out to me, but the effort made him gag and cough, so I walked over to him.

“What?”

“I... ah... just...” Clutching the door frame, he swallowed and blinked. “I just wanted to say that...” His voice clogged up. He raised some phlegm and spat. “I just realized that I never took you to a ball game, kid. Can you believe it? I never took my own son to a ball game!”

I looked at him levelly for a long moment, then I said, “You're really good. You play cards that most people don't even have in their deck.”

He grinned. “So who's the real con here, kid? Tell me.”

“You, Ray. You're the real con.”

He nodded. “I'll see you in hell, kid.” He winked and turned back into the building.

I rode out of Philadelphia. Early the next morning, I rolled in for coffee at What Cheer, Iowa, a one-dog town whose name had snagged my eye each time I passed it as I drifted back and forth across America. Sitting over a mug of thin hot coffee in an archetypal mid-American diner with its obligatory sprinkling of retired farmers wearing caps that advertised farm machinery, I jotted down a few swatches of dialogue for a tale about a man meeting his carnie father after many years, and the old man trying to touch him for a few bucks, just to prove that he was the better con.

Back in my attic room above a bar on Seattle's old Skid Road, half the wall above my work table was papered with rejection slips. I didn't find a publisher for I Never Took You to a Ball Game, Kid. Until now, that is.

A creaking old grain tramp brought me from Newport News to Europe, where I banged around on a pre-war Matchless until it broke down, marooning me in Sicily for lack of spare parts. I worked my way back to Paris. In the 1950s Paris was still the city of Baron Haussmann, Zola, Proust, and the Lost Generation, having not yet fallen victim to the cultural vandalism of inner-city gentrification or the aesthetic vandalism of egomaniacal politicians desperate to leave their mark on Paris. I wrote in 'brown' cafes without distracting music or clanging games, or I exchanged ideas and prejudices with other unknown but confident writers and painters, each of us making one small coffee last through the morning. I slept in tawdry hotels and sometimes in doorways or beneath bridges where I earned acceptance among the clochards by bringing vegetable crates from les Halles to burn in the communal oil drum. We would sit with our backs against the escarpment, swapping late-night lies as flames flickered beneath sooty arches. Winter came and we sometimes slept on the metal grills, where up-drafts of warm air from the Métro kept us from freezing. We lay on flattened-out cardboard boxes so the grills wouldn't bruise our hipbones.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note70#note70” ??[70]?

Spring arrived and I met a young woman who wore long dramatic capes, and whose eyes were flecked with the colors of autumn. We walked across Paris one blustery night as the shifting wind alternately billowed her cape out behind her or enfolded her within it, as I wanted to do. Dawn came while we were talking sleepily in a bar used by bakers on the Ile Saint Louis.

Beautiful and cheerful, she was also a talented painter whose attributes and qualities were totally antithetical to mine. Where I was cynical, she was accepting. Where I was judgmental, she was understanding. I drew my energy from anger and frustration; hers came from health and inner calm. I was a congenital pessimist; she was hopeful... no Pollyanna optimist, but a life-embracing woman making a healthy Pascal's Bet. I was tough; she was strong; I had impact, she endurance; I was a man of words, she a woman of images. The only thing we shared, other than physical desire for each other, was a sense of the absurd, the utter nonsense that delights the whimsical mind as much as it annoys the earthbound one. It was my inexplicable good fortune that she was willing to marry me, but everyone warned her that our profound differences could not support a long-lasting union.

For many restless years I dragged her and our children from place to place, forever running from my disappointments and self-inflicted injuries, and sapping her creative energy with the task of continual nest-building as I pursued the career best suited to my nomadic life, story-telling.

Things turned out well enough for the woman and two children you met sitting on the stoop outside their new home on North Pearl Street, their shoddy possessions piled around them.

As the film buffs among you will have guessed, Anne-Marie never did replace Shirley Temple. While still a teenager, she escaped the tensions and recriminations of Mother and Ben's home and fled into an early marriage with a winsome, breezy young man who turned out to have a serious problem with alcohol. Despite the emotional and financial difficulties his drinking caused, they produced half a dozen children, many grandchildren, and a host of great-grandchildren on whom Anne-Marie lavished love and care, and in whom she took, and still takes, great pride. She was widowed relatively young and her life has not been easy, but through all her trials she has developed her ability to find calm within herself. This enviable spiritual resource has helped her to accept life's injustices without bitterness, and she now lives a rich contemplative life.

Her ship has come in, and it is laden with the peace she always sought.

Mother's final decline into the kaleidoscopic ooze of Alzheimer's disease was mercifully rapid. The onset of her dementia had been slow and, in its way, merciful. As sometimes happens, the first things to disappear from her memory were the injustices and resentments she had nurtured and brooded over all her life. Ben vanished from her memory; my father followed soon after; and for the last two years she had no memory of ever having been abandoned or disappointed by any man. She sometimes recalled that she had once been married, but she remained sweetly vague about who he had been, and why he was no longer with her on their little farm on Puget Sound. Sometimes she believed that her husband was the man who was now her doctor, and sometimes her lawyer held this honor, and even, for a short period, the governor of her state. He was always a well-educated man who was also, she would confide with a wink, a great dancer and a real snappy dresser. In fact, she and her husband had won cups for dancing the Charleston. In her later years, she assumed that the big bouquet of Talisman roses and the peck of Northern Spy apples she received on each birthday came from her mythical husband... whichever one it was at the time.

The last year of her life she began to be visited by an Indian princess who came through the dazzling mist of the early mornings to tell her that she was vastly admired by all Indian women, who were grateful to her for getting them the vote. She once showed me a special blade of grass this Indian princess had given her as a token of how proud everyone was of her great success as a tap dancer, a fashion designer and a writer of novels. The fog that thickened around her remained pink almost to the end.