The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (69 page)

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58. '...the clapping, whistling audience' (p. 298)

The Jackson Strut was a wonderfully ironic non-event full of cocky authority and hollow panache. It was a jaunty stroll across the stage, with a slight point of the toe just before each foot touched the ground accompanied by a downward movement of both clenched fists held before the stomach, as though you were tugging your vest straight, all the while looking out at the audience with an expression of 'ain't I just the greatest thing alive?' Mother had seen the Jackson Strut performed by the vaudeville team Clayton, Jackson and Durante before vaudeville collapsed and Jimmy Durante reinvented himself as the leader of one of the many 'Original Dixieland Jazz Bands' made up of New Yorkers seeking to profit from Black musical traditions. When his band failed, he turned to comedy, first in films and later in neonate television.

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59. '...hits of the 1941-42 season' (p. 302)

White Christmas, I Don't Want to Walk Without You, There Are Such Things, Deep in the Heart of Texas, My Devotion, I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo, One Dozen Roses, Blues in the Night, Somebody Else is Taking My Place, Sleepy Lagoon, Mister Five by Five, Tangerine, I Had the Craziest Dream, Skylark, Who Wouldn't Love You?, Dearly Beloved, Why Don't You Do Right?, Elmer's Tune, I Remember You, That Old Black Magic, Serenade in Blue, There Will Never Be Another You, Don't Get Around Much Anymore.

I just wasted an hour writing out the lyrics to these songs to prove to myself that I still remembered them. I was appalled to realize that the dark crevasses of my mind are crammed with such trivia when I have trouble remembering what I did yesterday, and what I must do today.

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60. '...Frederick Remington' (p. 308)

Between them, Owen Wister and Frederick Remington provided America and the world with the proto-myths upon which the Western genre was founded. Wister, a Harvard-educated Philadelphian, wrote the stories that elevated the brutish, illiterate cowboy to a cultural icon of virile independence, earthy philosophy, and a passion for fair play, while Remington, a Yale-educated New York illustrator, created the visual aspects of the Western myth that are often, and wrongly, accredited to such film directors as John Ford and Sergio Leone, who did little more than record Remington's mythotypes and settings on film.

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61. '...hits of 1943' (p. 308)

Brazil; You'll Never Know; Paper Doll; People Will Say We're in Love; As Time Goes By (which had been written several years earlier by a man with the singularly horrisonant name, Herman Hupfeld, but it rocketed to delayed popularity because of the film, Casablanca); Sunday, Monday, or Always; I've Heard that Song Before; Don't Get Around Much Any More; All or Nothing at All; Elmer's Tune; Moonlight Becomes You; You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To; Pistol Packin' Mama; Oh, What a Beautiful Morning; That Old Black Magic; Speak Low; One for my Baby; Do Nothing 'Till You Hear From Me.

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62. '...thrown back into the sea' (p. 315)

The other four landing beaches were relatively 'soft', but a combination of strong rip tides, awkward terrain, and tenacious defense from fixed emplacements that the pre-landing bombardment had not sufficiently damaged made Omaha an abattoir. Not until the end of the war did we learn that our eventual breakout into the open country of the peninsula was largely due to Hitler's stubborn refusal to release first-rate troops from the Pas de Calais, where he kept them in the belief that the Normandy landings were only a feint to draw troops away from beaches closer to the ultimate destination of Paris.

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63. '...victory be far away?' (p. 317)

How long could the bombed-out shell that was Berlin hold out? Unlike the shameful xenophobic excesses on the home front during the First World War, our Anti-German propaganda had not dehumanized the mass of the German people in the way our anti-Japanese propaganda had; and now, in anticipation of the post-war need for a buffer against our nonce allies, the Russians, the American public was being told that we were not fighting the misguided German people, only their evil leaders.

But our propaganda depicted the Japanese, not as victims of a ruthless government, but as sub-human fanatics who were insanely determined to fight on to the last man. In the movies we saw blurred, jerky, hand-held (therefore realistic) newsreels showing our navy off Okinawa meeting a new and terrible weapon: kamikaze raids by pilots eager to sacrifice their lives for country and emperor... proof that they were infinitely more primitive and savage than our brave young boys willing to die for the stars and stripes, Mom, apple pie, and the American Dream. Nor was the kamikaze spirit limited to pilots and planes. On April 6th, the greatest battleship the world will ever know, the seventy-two thousand ton Yamato armed with 18-inch guns, was dispatched with barely enough fuel for the outward leg of a suicidal mission against the American fleet supporting the Okinawa invasion. But, as both the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway had shown at the beginning of the war, the era of the battleship was over. Alone, without escort or air cover, the Yamato was a lumbering target for attacks by carrier-based dive-bombers and torpedo planes, and it sank on April 7th without having scratched the paint of an American ship. It was obvious that with their cities flattened, their sources of raw materials amputated, and their industry reduced to rubble, the Japanese could not win the war, indeed could not long continue to fight. But we were told that their maniac blend of fatalism and fanaticism made it impossible for them to surrender, so they would have to be slain to the last man, woman, and bloodthirsty child. The necessity of this regrettable course of action was demonstrated when the Japanese unleashed a frightening new variant of the 'divine wind' upon us: the baka-bomb (baka means 'crazy'), which claimed its first victim off Okinawa on April 12 th, the destroyer Abele. The baka-bomb, a rocket-powered glider full of high explosives was towed into range by an old bomber or cargo plane, then released within sight of the enemy to be guided to its target by its self-immolating pilot. Its rocket engine made it too fast to be swatted out of the sky by curtains of ack-ack, as the majority of the lumbering, out-dated kamikaze planes had been.

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64. '...moments of escape and adventure were behind me' (p. 320)

My children have given me similar bittersweet moments of letting-go when a word, a gesture, or just the unspoken message behind a glance told me that the child was gone, and I would henceforth be dealing with a young man or woman. From then on, I would have to negotiate with this person differently than as father to child, if I were to continue to be valuable and dear to them. I realized, of course, that this is the natural and necessary way of things, but how sorry I was to lose the child I had held as a baby, naked and rubbery after the bath. I felt intensely sorry for myself that we would never again play the silly games or delight in the devilish teasing and our intricately constructed nonsense worlds. I would no longer be the most important man in their lives.

And I experienced similar pangs of nostalgia for my country one winter when I stood in the slanting light of a feeble late-afternoon sun, alone amongst the grass-grown ruins that had once been a roaring railroad camp, Tie Siding, Wyoming, which I had visited because it would be a locale for a novel in the Western genre. I had to fly out the next morning to return to my home in the Basque country (? HYPERLINK “http://www.trevanian.com/tdesk/tdesk.htm” ?see here?), and I knew that declining health meant I would never see America again. I have always had a profound pride in the democratic ideals and the common sense institutions born of New England convictions and Virginia spirit, and I have always felt what might be called a geographic patriotism for my country... the florid glory of Vermont sugar bush in fall, the big skies of Wyoming's high plateaus, the lunar sublimity of the Badlands, shadow-waves scudding across seas of yellow grain in Nebraska, the crashing sea off California's north coast, the purple and taupe twilight of a New Mexican desert. Leaving the places where I had lived and worked was painful, but I felt no pangs about leaving aspects of my country that were alien to its origins and to mine: the moral collapse into savage capitalism that marked the entrepreneurial 'Nineties; the stupidity of seeking social equality by lowering the peaks of individual excellence rather than lifting the troughs of mass ignorance that has been the effect, if not the intention, of multi-cultural education; the venomous intellectual impoverishment of fundamentalism, the energy of which flows from a hatred of others and of otherness; the cold-blooded cynicism of modern politics with its plastic MacKandidates manipulated by spin-doctors and sound-bite merchants and owned body and soul by commercial eco-criminals like the petrochemical combines, commercial thieves like the pharmaceutical industry and commercial murderers like the tobacco companies; the myopic, selfish indifference to the quality of their grandchildren's lives that leads Americans to poison their land with chemical fertilizers, leak atomic waste into their deep rock strata, degrade their air with petrochemical emissions, squander dwindling ground water by creating golf courses in the desert for the superannuated rich, then refusal to join the rest of the world in trying to slow down the damage being inflicted on our planet.

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65. '...just in case.' (p. 320)

I never used it again. It came with us across the United States to California, only to be left behind when I went north following the apple harvest, never to return... not at a child, anyway. I wonder if the kid who found it...? No, probably not. Years later, finding myself out of work at the age of 40 and having to make a living with my pen, I wrote a spoof on the derring-do/anti-hero novel which surprisingly, indeed embarrassingly, became a best-seller. My publisher received fan mail asking how Trevanian could write scenes of high adventure with such breathtaking realism and telling detail.

Nothing to it, Honored Reader. Not for a man who has lived through the Battle of Washington Park Hill and still bears the emotional scars.

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66. '...hits of the last year of the war.' (p. 324)

Most of those songs have fallen from the memory of our mass culture, and I suppose deservedly so on a musical basis, but some of the lyrics were clever or evocative or touching in a way that lyrics stopped being with the arrival of yeah-yeah-yeah rock-'n' roll or, worse yet, with the virulent anti-music that is rap, with their cultural vandalism, sexist aggression, sub-literate verse, and puerile politics. No one could blame Black Americans if, after having given the world jazz, the most significant music of the Twentieth Century, and finding themselves still treated as cultural and social inferiors, they decided to get even by crapping the anti-music of rap upon us. All right, all right, I understand. But now we're even, right?

The mere mention of a popular song title can evoke an era with more piquancy than any amount of descriptive writing, and this is why I have here and there dusted these pages with song titles, although I realize that only the oldest of my readers will experience the sudden inrush of memories that these old songs can summon. For me, the hits of 1944 instantly recall the three of us sitting around that kitchen table, singing late into the night:

I'll Be Seeing You; Long Ago and Far Away; Besame Mucho; Don't Fence Me In; Mairsy Doats and Dozy Doats and Little Lamsey Divy (I had to look up the capricious spelling); Dance with a Dolly (...with a hole in her stocking); I Couldn't Sleep a Wink Last Night; Swinging on a Star; Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby?; I'm Making Believe; It Had to be You; I'm Confessin' (...that I love you); I'll Get By; I'm Beginning to See the Light; Sentimental Journey; Moonlight in Vermont; Every Time We Say Goodbye.

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67. '...hadn't quite understood it' (p. 328)

My children might tell you that I have inherited that trait, but that's only because they don't quite understand.

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68. '...budding young socialist' (p. 349)

The most recent illustration of capitalism's institutional depravity came in the aftermath of the assault the World Trade Center by fanatics of Al Qaeda. It was widely assumed that the leaders of Big Business who had financed America's minority president's campaign and were already benefiting from congenial legislation wouldn't let America down in her time of need. Surely they would step in and protect her economy.

What they actually did was to grasp the opportunity to 'rationalize' their operations, lay off workers, and demand compensation and support from the taxpayers. Then came revelations of the duplicity of leaders major American corporations who had cooked their books to produce false profits, invaded workers' retirement funds, and avoided paying their taxes. And when they knew they were nearing discovery, they quickly sold off their stock in their own companies, reaping fortunes, and leaving their workers destitute.

Other corrupt corporations and individuals took this opportunity to confess their villainy on the speculation that they might avoid punishment in the anonymity of general chaos. These companies included banks that had pushed paper they knew to be weak, and accountancy firms that had concealed the fraud and profited from it.