The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

by Trevanian

“Eleven cents is the small loaf.”

  “...Oh. I don’t think I can...”

  “Of course, day-old bread is only a nickel.”

  “Do you have any day-old bread?”

  He looked down on me, his eyes huge through thick lenses. “Well, I close up shop pretty soon. Tell you what; I’ll sell you a loaf of tomorrow’s day-old bread. How’s that?”

  I hated people giving us stuff or doing us favors, as though we couldn’t make our own way. I hated it because my mother resented it so much. But...

  “Okay.”

  There was a shout outside as one boy ‘sizzled’ another by snapping his fingernails down across the kid’s butt in a way that stings like hell. The sizzled kid took a swing at the other, who ran down the street, and a couple of kids ran after him, laughing and shouting. If I could only give them a little more time, maybe the rest of them would go away somewhere.

  “We just moved in,” I told Mr Kane brightly.

  “Yes, I saw you sitting over on the stoop of 238, surrounded by your possessions, like a band of Arabs in the desert. When business is slow, so it shouldn’t be a total loss, I use my time to keep an eye on the street. After all, if I don’t keep an eye on it, who will? I heard you tell one of your tormentors that you’re from Lake George Village.”

  “Oh, do you know Lake George Village?”

  “Never heard of it. But if I concentrate I can almost...” He closed his huge eyes. “An image is coming to me through the mist. I see a small town. No, no, it’s more like a village. And I see...I see water! Is it a river? The ocean? No, it’s...a lake! And it’s named after a person...wait a minute, wait a minute, it’s coming to me. Is it Lake Nathan? No, not Nathan. Lake Samuel? No, not Sam—Ah! I’ve got it! George! It’s Lake George, by George!”

  I didn’t mind his teasing. I could tell he loved to perform, and there were still a couple of kids outside the cornerstore, so I said, “We came to Albany to be with my father. He made a party for us.”

  “A party?”

  “A Saint Patrick’s Day party. He’s out getting us a green cake.”

  “A green cake? H’m, I did see a man come out of 238 this morning. Dapper-looking gentleman, he was. And, you know, I remarked at the time that there was something in the way he walked that suggested a man on the trail of a cake. But I’ve got to be honest with you. From across the street I couldn’t tell it was a green cake he was after. It could have been any color for all I knew.”

  “Yes, we’re waiting for him to come back for the party.”

  A woman’s voice from the back room called out in an exasperated whine, wanting to know if Mr Kane was going to close up or did he intend to stay open all night! His soup was getting cold!

  “Ah. My life-burden calls.” He chanted back, “Coming, dear.”

  “Well, I better be getting home.” I put my quarter up on the top of the glass candy case that served as a counter.

  “Why don’t I just put it on the slate until your welfare check comes in?”

  “We don’t have any—”

  But he was already opening the scuffed and thumbed notebook that was his ‘slate’. “Now, what name shall I put down? Mr and Mrs George, from the lake of the same name?”

  My mother had punitively reverted to her maiden name after my father abandoned her with me still in her arms and Anne-Marie ‘under her heart’. To avoid confusion and comment she had entered me in school as Jean-Luc LaPointe, not using my father’s name. “LaPointe,” I said.

  “...Mr and Mrs LaPointe,” he droned as he carefully printed the name at the top of a page. “The LaPointes from France, I assume?”

  “My grandfather came from Canada. We’re part Indian.”

  “Oh-oh. Not one of those tribes notorious for scalping shopkeepers and making off with his penny candies!”

  “No, not that kind.”

  “Whew! Talk about your close calls! So that’s fifteen cents for one jar of butter of the peanut variety...” he wrote, “...and five cents for a loaf of bread; size: small; age: one day old. Neonate bread, the bakers call it.” He closed the slate with a snap and waggled his thick eyebrows up and down above his huge eyes.

  When I returned to our apartment with the bread, the peanut butter, and the quarter still intact, I had to explain to my mother that we were down on Mr Kane’s slate and didn’t have to pay until our check came in.

  “What check?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And he gave you credit, just like that?”

  “I guess he gives everybody credit. The boys said he’s a Jew and he doesn’t give credit, but he does. He has a book that he calls his slate.”

  “H’m!” She didn’t like the sound of that. She hated feeling beholden. Especially to strangers. “It’ll be a hot day in hell before I go begging from strangers! What were you thinking of, Jean-Luc?”

  “I don’t know, I just—”

  But she said never mind, she’d straighten things out in the morning.

  We ate our peanut butter sandwiches at the kitchen table from which I had carefully cleared the paper plates and napkins so they could be replaced exactly where they had been for our Saint Patrick’s Day party. I could tell that Mother didn’t like my fussing that way. She was seething inside over something, so I kept my head down and didn’t say anything. But Anne-Marie kept eyeing the bottle of lime soda. I told her we had to save it for the party, so everything would be green.

  Mother sniffed. “Party! If I could find our bottle opener among all this crap, I’d open that soda quick enough. And I’d pour it down the sink!”

  “But you can’t. That’d spoil everything!”

  “A big goddamn Saint Patrick’s party! That’s just like your father. You don’t know his ways. I do. Always the big noise. The big show! He leaves us in the lurch for four years without so much as a word, and we don’t know if he’s alive or dead or what the hell, and now he’s going to throw a big party, and that’s supposed to make everything just fine and dandy! And the worst of it is that he’s probably going to get away with it. Sure! When you kids are grown up, it won’t be the years I’ve shrimped and saved and worked my fingers to the knuckle that you’ll remember. It won’t be how I’ve had to worry and fret, scared that I’d get real sick, and then what’d happen to you, I’d like to know. No, what you’ll remember will be Ray’s goddamn green Saint Patrick’s Day cake! He runs away leaving me with all the work and worry, then he comes back with a big splash and we’re all supposed to forgive him! Goddamn him to hell! And we’re not even Irish!” But she shook her head and I knew that she was perversely proud of his cheek and lan. Who else would have had the brass to throw a party instead of saying he was sorry? Throughout the years we had been alone, whenever Mother got fed up with struggling to keep us in food and clothing, and especially when she was afraid she might be hospitalized with one of her lung attacks and social workers might come and take us kids away from her, she would give vent to her disappointment and fury. But after accusing him of being weak and irresponsible and selfish, she always ended up mentioning, in a give-the-goddamned-devil-his-due way, that he was a smooth dancer and a nifty dresser and that he had buckets of charm and what she called ‘real class’. Ruby Lucile LaPointe wasn’t the sort to fall for just any pair of trousers. No, sir.

  My sister and I knew our father only from a photograph taken during their two-day honeymoon in New York City in 1929: a slim, handsome man in a white linen summer suit, the jacket held open by a fist on one hip to reveal a silk waistcoat, a straw boater tipped rakishly over one eye, his smile at once knowing and boyishly mischievous. After their honeymoon, he sent Mother back to the village of Granville to stay with her cousin Lorna and her husband while he went down to Florida to join up with friends who had let him in on a foolproof enterprise that would make him lots of money fast. Something to do with land speculation. He would return
at the end of the summer and they could begin their life together. On Easy Street, Toots! Over the next two weeks, my mother received a letter from him every day, then one a week for the next month, then silence, and her letters to him were returned ‘Address Unknown’. I was born nine months and six days after their marriage, and as soon as she was strong enough after a difficult birth (I heard the clinical particulars of this exceptionally long and arduous birth many times) we moved away from Lorna and her husband, who always grumbled about having to share his house and food with a cousin-in-law and her squalling brat. Mother got a job as a waitress in the summer resort where she had met my father, and we lived there until a letter from my father was forwarded to her by her cousin. He had run into some ‘trouble’ that led to his becoming an honored guest of the state of Florida for a year and a day. He hadn’t written because there was nothing she could do to help him, so what was the point of distressing her? But he was a free man again, and a wiser one, and he was coming back north to meet some friends in Montreal who were letting him in on a sure thing. He stopped off on his way and spent one night with us at Lake George. I think I remember a man who came bearing a very big teddy bear, but I might only be remembering my mother’s description of his arrival on our doorstep, tipsy, singing, and bearing an oversized teddy bear with which he staged a comic wrestling match to my giggling delight, ending up on the floor with the teddy bear triumphantly astride his chest as he begged for mercy. I wonder what happened to that teddy bear? Mother never said so, but I suspect she threw it out in a rage when he disappointed her again. The only time she ever spoke of this one-night visit she shook her head fatalistically and said, “All that man had to do was unbutton his suspenders and I got pregnant.” The deal in Montreal fell through and my father disappeared from sight for a month or two. Then another letter came asking us to meet him in Schenectady, where he had reason to believe he could pick up a little action. His letter went on to say, “I know what anxiety and worry you’ve been through, Toots. All I ask is a chance to make it up to you. And remember...‘You Were Meant for Me’.” This song title had little notes written around it. The citing of ‘their song’ and the coyness of ‘...as an honored guest of the State of Florida...’ are typical of the letters from him I found among my mother’s things after her death. She had saved every one of them, a total of nineteen, all written in a blend of jocular Runyonesque style, sudden sincerity, unabashed sentimentalism, and kittenish duplicity. In short, a con man’s letters.

  I should mention that my mother never told us that our father spent time in prison, presumably to protect us from the shame. I learned about this later, when reading over the letters she left behind.

  We joined my father in Schenectady in the winter of 1932–33, the nadir of the Depression, when dazed men stood on street corners, the collars of their suit jackets turned up, and begged passers-by for jobs or handouts, hopelessness muting their voices to mantra drones. We survived on a series of short-lived scams he ran, penny-ante hustles that didn’t require much setup money. One of these was the Sure-Fire Employment Agency that disappeared from its storefront office within a month. (Mother had one of the business cards for this fraudulent enterprise in her photograph album, its corners held by stick-on tabs.) Another hustle was selling exclusive franchises to market Jiffy Fifteen-Way Mirakle Kleener (Fels Naphtha bar soap cooked down in water, bottled, and labeled in the kitchen of our basement apartment to flash as samples of the product). I remember standing in the front room looking up at the window to see the legs of people passing by, sometimes followed by little doggies that sniffed the window and sometimes cocked a leg at it, their leashes leading up from their collars to...nowhere. The room was full of the nose-stinging steam of yellow bar soap being cooked down to make Mirakle Kleener.

  The Sure-Fire Employment Agency scam provides an insight into the con-man mentality that reasons: If you can’t find a job, then it must be possible to make money off other people trying to find jobs. And the jobs my father offered were opportunities to become franchised door-to-door salesmen of Jiffy Fifteen-Way Mirakle Kleener. This double-barreled scam shows how hustlers automatically think on the diagonal. Lots of men with no work and a family to support might have bottled and peddled Mirakle Kleener from door to door; but only cons like my father would have sold other out-of-work men franchises to sell it: offering them not only a chance to survive but an opportunity to ‘Make a Killing in the Cleaning Industry!’ because, let’s face it, no matter how good or how bad things are, there’ll always be dirt! My father had the con man’s instinct for the jugular of human greed.

  These low-grade scams ultimately built up a body of victims eager for an opportunity to inflict retributive damage (if I may imitate my father’s hokum/comic style, á la W. C. Fields), so it is not surprising that after seven months in Schenectady he accepted an offer from ‘some friends’ to go to South Dayton, New York, and supervise the transport of what his first letter back to Mother called ‘prohibited merchandise’ from Canada to ‘deprived communities’. National prohibition had just ended, but the old supply systems remained functional because there were still dry states and counties. A second letter told her that he missed her more than he could say because ‘You Were Meant for Me’, Toots. Following this letter, there was a three-year silence, during the first month of which my sister was born.

  It was while we were in Schenectady that I ran away from home for the first time. For some reason, perhaps because the return of my father suddenly deprived me of my mother’s undivided attention, I began to wet my bed at night, although I had been toilet-trained for a year. The first couple of times this happened, my mother dismissed it as a ‘phase’, but she was ultimately obliged to accept that it was full-blown regression. She decided to correct my urinary insouciance using a method she had read about in a book on ‘modern’ child-raising, a book that was against corporal punishment, preferring bloodless tactics that caused only emotional and developmental damage. One evening she came back from shopping with a package for me. I eagerly tore off the wrapping and discovered to my surprise, but not to my horror, a dress that she had picked up in a second-hand clothing shop. Following the advice in her book, she told me that if I was going to act like a little wet-the-bed girlie, then I would have to dress like a little wet-the-bed girlie, and she made me take off my clothes and put on the dress. At first I didn’t realize this game was meant to be a punishment. Dressing up like a girl seemed strange, but not shameful; and I was far from displeased by the attention I got as I pranced around the room in my dress. It was only when my father grasped my arm angrily and said that I would have to wear the dress like a little girlie until I decided to stop wetting my bed that I realized the costume was meant to be humiliating. I was first confused then hurt by the realization that my mother...my mother was trying to shame me. And this big man was angry because I had found the punishment amusing. I threw myself to the floor and kicked and screamed and tried to tear the damning dress off me. But I was put into my crib wearing the dress, and long after my incensed screams had collapsed into sobs and gasps, I lay in the dark, my teeth clenched.

  I had overheard my mother talking about a naughty boy in the apartment above ours who ran away from home, not caring how much his parents suffered and worried until he was found and returned to them. This equipped me with the means to avenge my humiliation. I would run away to my grandfather LaPointe, who had been the only man in my life before the return of this father who had changed my loving mother into a woman who liked to shame me. They would suffer and worry about where I was, but I would never return to them; instead I would go live with my grandfather who had choo-choo trains and would give me rides all the time.

  The next evening, when this...father...was safely out of the house and my mother was upstairs having coffee with the neighbor lady, I collected my knitted winter hat with a green tassel, a folded-over piece of bread for sustenance, and my red Christmas tricycle for transportation, and I left home fore
ver. I can recall only blurred snapshots of the great escape: pushing my tricycle along the edge of a sidewalk crowded with impatient workers swarming out of some big factory; then night fell, and I was cold and scared. I remember waiting forever for the courage to cross a wide street with floods of noisy, speeding traffic, then being helped across by an old lady; and I asked a gasoline-smelling man in a service station with green-and-orange pumps which way it was to the choo-choo trains; and later I got tired of pushing the red tricycle, so I left it in a dark narrow space between two buildings where I could find it when I needed it. But I never found it again, and it started to rain, and I needed to poo very badly, but didn’t know where to go, so I poo’d in my pants. A car pulled over to the curb and a policeman got out and asked me my name and where I was going, then he told the policeman in the car that I was the one the lady had called about, and that I smelled pretty ‘high’. I remember being obliged to sit on newspapers in the back seat with the windows open as they drove me back home.

  My mother cried and yelled and kissed me and smacked my legs and hugged me and cleaned me up and got me warm by bathing me in the kitchen sink, then she fed me and told my father that he’d better get rid of that damned dress or he’d have to deal with her, believe me you! I slept in my cozy crib that night, and never wet the bed again. I don’t know what happened to the book on modern child-raising. I never saw it again.

  My father went out the next morning to look for work. After a few days our money ran out, and my mother was obliged to accept that he wasn’t coming back. She had been abandoned...again. She sent a letter to my grandfather and he took a day off from his job as station master of the whistle-stop railroad depot in Fort Anne to help us move back to Lake George Village. We were tided over by small amounts of money from my grandfather, who depleted his savings by helping to support his children and his nieces through the Depression. My first sure, unfragmented memories come from the time Mother and I and my new baby sister lived in Lake George Village with only a tin kerosene heater to combat the cold that seeped through the uninsulated walls of a two-room summer cottage. As a special treat after she got back from work late at night, my mother used to make us toast on the top of that kerosene heater: toast that browned in the intricate hole patterns of the heater’s lid. I loved the char taste of that toast, and the crunch of it between my teeth, and the late-night celebration of all being together. And I remember my grandfather’s weekly visits. He used to smell of talcum powder and leather and he always took me on his lap and asked me how the world was getting on, then he gave me a lollipop. After supper, he would play two-handed pinochle with my mother and make her laugh by pretending to be furious about the rotten cards he’d been dealt. His visits were not only to give us the little money he could spare, but also to sustain us morally. I was enormously proud of my grandfather, and not only because he was in charge of trains and could click messages down a wire all the way to New York City, if he wanted to, but also because he was a half-blood Onondagan whose parents had immigrated to the United States from their unproductive farm on a tributary of the St. Lawrence. This meant that I was an Indian3 too, although my grandfather’s marriage to a woman from a New England family and my mother’s marriage to a man of English extraction combined to dilute my Indian blood terribly. Nevertheless, I used to feel a secret and thrilling kinship with a bronze statue of an Indian drinking water from his palm in Lake George Village.