by Trevanian
My grandfather’s car skidded off the road in a blinding snowstorm when he was driving from Granville, where he had given money and encouragement to his niece and her husband, to Lake George, where he was going to do the same for us. When the news of his death came, my mother was sick in bed. She had caught a bad chest cold walking to work through the snow, and for days she had been lying in the back room, a wracking cough denying her sleep and bursts of high fever causing her to drift along the edges of reality—a recurring pattern of illness that was to become familiar over the years. The neighbor lady who was looking in on my sister and me assured us that Mother would make it through, “...so don’t you worry your little heads.” It hadn’t even occurred to me that my mother might not make it through until the neighbor’s assurances suggested that terrible possibility. And it was this same neighbor who got the telephone call about my grandfather and decided that the news of his death would be easier for my mother to bear if it came from me. This neighbor lady whispered into my ear that my grandfather had been killed in a car crash, then she pushed me into the dark bedroom, and when I paused, unwilling, she urged me forward with impatient flicks of her fingers.
I sat on the side of my mother’s bed—she smelled of sleep and the mustard tang of Balm Bengu—and I stroked her damp forehead as I told her that her father had gone to heaven. I was four and a half and she was twenty-five, and on that snowy evening I became my mother’s confidant and ‘good right hand’, roles that were to continue throughout my childhood. I was proud of my newfound importance; but my retreat into long and complex story games began at this time.
Two years passed, and my mother had just been told that she wouldn’t have a job come the summer because her bad health made her unreliable, when she received a letter from my father, a letter I have before me on my desk. He had made an ‘error in judgment’ for which he had been given five-to-seven in ‘an institution dedicated to the moral reconstruction of those who take shortcuts to success and comfort’. But he had proved ‘a contrite and willing pilgrim on the road to redemption’ and had received early release after working as assistant to the prison librarian. He was now in Albany, the state capital, and he had rented us temporary lodgings until he was able to find a decent job...maybe in a library somewhere. He was all through with chasing rainbows. He was ready to settle down and make a life for his family. He knew he didn’t deserve a second chance (or was it a third chance?), but...‘You Were Meant for Me’, Toots. Remember?
Although Mother had vowed never to accept another thing from her cousin’s husband after the way he had complained about being burdened with us, she swallowed her pride and wrote, asking if he could bring us and our stuff down to Albany in his old truck. During the trip, I looked out the side window at passing farmland, at the blur of bushes beside the road, and up at the telephone wires that seemed to part and re-weave, part and re-weave above us. And now we were eating peanut butter sandwiches in the kitchen of 238, and Anne-Marie and I were anticipating the Saint Patrick’s Day party to celebrate our family’s finally getting together to start a new life.
It was growing dark, so Mother turned the old-fashioned porcelain switch for the kitchen’s naked overhead lightbulb. Nothing.
“Just like him! Didn’t even think to get the electric turned on!”
I had an idea. I went into the bathroom and turned its switch, and the light came on. The kitchen bulb was only burned out. So we finished our sandwiches by the light from the open bathroom door. For some time Anne-Marie had been dipping and dozing on the rim of sleepiness, then her head would snap up as she fought to stay awake until her father came home with the green cake, which she was determined not to miss.
But Mother stood up with a sigh and said he’d come when he came, and there was no point in our sitting up all night. She unpacked the box containing our sheets and our most treasured possession, three Hudson Bay blankets given to her as a wedding present by my grandfather, and we made the beds together. The blankets were thick, top-quality, ‘five-tail’ Hudson Bays with those bands of bright color that fur traders thought would appeal to primitive Indian taste sufficiently to make them part with five beaver hides to get one. I had seen pictures of Indian chiefs wearing ‘five-tail’ blankets, and I wished the neighbors who had scoffed at our battered possessions out on the sidewalk knew that we also owned three of the best woolen blankets in the world. Mother put her reluctant but comatose daughter into the little bed in their bedroom, where, after making Mother promise to wake her up for the party, Anne-Marie instantly fell into a deep sleep, sucking her fingers. Mother and I sat at the kitchen table for a while, silent and with that metallic emptiness in the stomach that follows long periods of excitement. Then she said we might as well go to bed too. I could help her unpack in the morning. I kissed her good-night and told her I’d just set the table first, and I began putting the green paper plates and napkins back into place around the bottle of lime soda, while Mother watched me, shaking her head.
“You’re my good right hand, Jean-Luc. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
She kissed me good-night and turned out the bathroom light, and the crepe paper chains disappeared into the dark of the high ceiling.
I lay on my daybed in the front room, which never got totally dark because a streetlamp cast a diagonal slab of light from one corner to the other. I was looking up at the ceiling, intrigued by how, each time a car passed out on the street, the edge-ghost of its headlights slid through and around the chandelier rosette in the middle of which a single lightbulb dangled from a paint-stiffened wire. I lay there for what was, for a kid, a long time, maybe ten minutes, until I thought Mother was asleep, then I eased out of bed stealthily and went to the window to watch for my father’s arrival. He’d be the one coming down the street carrying the string-tied baker’s box with a green cake that he’d finally found after going from one end of Albany to the other, and I would sneak out onto the stoop and beckon him in, putting my finger across my lips to signal him to walk on tiptoes, and we’d put the cake in the middle of the kitchen table and open the green soda carefully, so the pffffft sound wasn’t too loud, and we’d get everything ready, then we’d go into the bedroom and wake Mother and Anne-Marie, and they’d be surprised and all smiles and...
I heard a faint sound from the back bedroom. I knew that sound, and hated it. My mother was crying softly to herself, as she did only when the bad breaks and the loneliness and ill health built up until they overwhelmed her. She cried when she was afraid, and the thought of my mother being afraid frightened me in turn, because if that buoyant, energetic woman couldn’t handle whatever the problem was, what chance did I have? Sometimes, I would go to her and pat her shoulder and kiss her wet, salty cheek, but I always felt so helpless that the pit of my stomach would burn. Precocious at games and arithmetic, I had learned a couple of months earlier how to play two-handed ‘honeymoon’ pinochle, her favorite game and one that reminded her of her father. Sometimes playing pinochle took her mind off our problems. But the cards were deep in one of our boxes somewhere, and anyway, I didn’t feel like sitting with her, helpless and hopeless. Everything would be fine when my father got back. Even if he hadn’t managed to find a green cake...but I was sure he would...he’d care for Mother when she was sick and kiss her tears away when she was blue and play pinochle with her and take responsibility for keeping the family well and happy, and I’d just play my story games, and everything would be fine. I put my cheek against the cool window pane so I could look as far up the empty street as possible. People passed by occasionally: lone men walking slowly, their fists deep in their pockets, wishing this night were over; women hastening to get somewhere on time; young couples with their arms around each other’s waist, keeping hip contact by stepping out with their inside legs at the same time, wishing this night would go on forever. When a car passed, the edge of its headlights rippled over the brick facades on both sides of the street and lit up my ceiling briefly.
I considered slipping into my shoes and going out onto the stoop to await my father’s arrival, but the night was cold, so I sat on the edge of my bed with my Hudson Bay blanket around me Indian-style and watched the street, as I would do night after night.
My father never came. But, of course, you have anticipated that for some time.
Settling In
BACK IN Lake George Village, I had been used to waking up to the sounds of birds chirping and little creatures rustling in the woods behind the summer cottage we rented, but that first morning on North Pearl Street I was wrenched out of sleep by the sound of my mother thrashing around angrily back in the kitchen. I went in to find her wobbling precariously atop the narrow kitchen table as she snatched down the green crepe paper festoons. One loop was just out of reach and she almost fell stretching out for it. I suggested we move the table, and she told me the last thing she needed was a six-year-old telling her what to do, goddamnit! Then she came down and hugged my head to her stomach and said she didn’t mean to snap at her first-born and good right hand, but she was determined to get rid of all this green party crap that reminded her of that no-good, lying, irresponsible bastard!
Always spiky and short-tempered the morning after a night of grief or regret, she would rage against ‘the big-shots’ and ‘the rotten way things are’. Although she always assured my sister and me that it wasn’t us she was mad at, just the goddamned world out there, we were the ones who winced as she unleashed the famous French-’n’-Indian temper that served as both a purgative for depression and a source of flash energy in her struggle to keep our family together against the odds. This explosive safety valve of hers frightened Anne-Marie and angered me. Sometimes her shouting, door-slamming, pan-throwing rages against life’s injustices would make me yell at her in defensive counter-rage, and we’d have a brief, hot word-fight that would make my sister recoil into herself. Then suddenly the storm would pass and we’d both be sorry. Mother would hug me and suggest that the three of us go out and play tag or Simon Says or some other kids’ game. She was wonderful about playing games with us. Even after we came to Pearl Street and were under the eyes of the block’s gossips, she would sometimes come out and play with us, shrugging off the harsh glances and captious muttering of neighbor ladies who thought she was just showing off her youth and energy and suppleness. As, indeed, she was, to a degree.
Silent now, but simmering within, Mother gathered up the green paper plates and napkins and crammed them into a bucket that would serve as our garbage can until she could afford to buy one (we used that bucket for eight years), then she grasped the warm bottle of lime soda by its neck, stepped out into the sooty backyard and, throwing side-armed like a boy, hurled it over the weathered board fence into the back alley, where the bottle burst with an effervescent explosion that I’d have given anything to have seen.
But what a waste! I’d never tasted green soda because my mother was against our drinking ‘fizzy crap’, in part because it wasn’t good for us, and in part because it was expensive.
Anne-Marie came padding sleepy-eyed into the kitchen and she knew immediately what had happened. She was painfully sensitive to Mother’s rages and could always smell the sulfur in the air. She looked at the paper plates in the bucket, then at me. I shrugged. She smiled faintly and waited until Mother was not in the kitchen before she dared to retrieve a couple of the crumpled plates to play ‘Saint Patrick’s Day party’ with.
After a breakfast of peanut butter sandwiches Mother held the first of many ‘war councils’ around that kitchen table. Here’s how things were: We were marooned on this slum street in this strange city where we didn’t know anybody and nobody gave a damn about us, and we had only a little more than five bucks to our name. But we weren’t beaten. Not by a damnsight. Nobody beats Ruby Lucile LaPointe! No, sir! In all the years she’d taken care of us kids alone, her pride had never let her seek public assistance, and it burned her up to have to do so now, but she’d been thinking about things all night long, and she couldn’t let pride stand in the way of us kids having food on the table. There must be agencies and people that she could turn to, just until we were on our feet again. First she’d contact them and ask them for help...make them help us, goddammit! Then she’d look for work as a waitress. A hard-working, experienced waitress can always find work, even if it’s only split-shift, or standing in for girls who call in sick. She’d go around to every goddamned restaurant in the city putting her name in with the managers. But first, she had to find out the addresses of the welfare agencies. If only she knew someone she could ask about things like this.
“What about Mr Kane?” I suggested.
“The grocery man? Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think we want any more favors from his sort.”
“...His sort?”
She shrugged.
“But he’s nice,” I said. “And smart, too.”
She thought about that for a moment. She didn’t like being beholden to strangers, but...Oh, all right, she’d go over to thank him for giving us credit. That was just common courtesy. And maybe while she was there she’d...“You know, come to think of it, this Mr Kane of yours just might help us out because if he doesn’t, we won’t be able to pay what we owe him. You can only count on people if there’s something in it for them.”
“He’d help us anyway. He’s nice.”
She humph’d. She often said, and honestly believed, that she was not prejudiced—well, except in the case of Italian mobsters and drunken Irish loafers and stupid Poles and snooty Yankee Protestants, but then who wasn’t? Among the cultural scars left by her early years in convent school was a stereotypical view of ‘the people who slew Jesus’. “On the other hand,” she said, always wanting to be fair, “I served some very nice Jewish people in Lake George Restaurant last season. They always chose my station. Real good tippers. But then they had to be, didn’t they? To make up for things.”
I accompanied her across the street, and Mr Kane spent half the morning looking up the appropriate welfare agencies and using the pay phone at the back of his shop to call people and make appointments for my mother, while I took occasional trips back to our apartment to make sure Anne-Marie was all right, but she could just look out the front window and see us in Kane’s Cornerstore. Mr Kane gave Mother a dog-eared map of downtown Albany so she could find the addresses and he drew her up a list of things she should bring with her to the welfare offices: her marriage license, our birth certificates, her most recent address in Lake George, the telephone number of his store, where messages could be left for her...things like that. I looked up at my mother to give her an ‘I told you he was nice’ look, and I was surprised to see tears standing in her eyes. She said later that she didn’t know what got into her. I think that Mr Kane’s kindly manner sapped the constant background rage that gave her the grit to face difficult situations. Whatever the reason, the next thing I knew she was telling him about my father, and how he had run out on us twice before, and about our coming to Albany in the hope of starting life as a family, and about the Saint Patrick’s Day party with the green cake...everything. Pushing the tears back into her eyes with the heel of her hand, she confessed that she didn’t know what she would do if somebody didn’t help her. One thing was sure: she wouldn’t let her kids starve! No, sir! She’d steal—kill even!—before she’d let her kids starve. Distressed by her tears, Mr Kane rubbed his hands together, not daring to pat her shoulder compassionately lest she misunderstand the gesture (or, worse yet, lest his wife do so). He told her he didn’t want to pry or anything, but maybe he should also contact the local ward heeler. See if the machinery could be oiled to make it turn a little faster. Otherwise, we might have to wait months for our case to make its way through the turgid system. She thanked him for his help, but now there was a chill in her tone. I could tell that she was ashamed of having broken down before this stranger. As we crossed the street back to 238 she told me that I must always be careful with thes
e people.
“But Mr Kane was just trying to be...”
“They have a way of worming things out of you.”
“He wasn’t worming any—”
“You just be careful what you tell them, and that’s final. Period!”
Later that month, when we were able to begin paying something against our slate, my mother felt vindicated in her mistrust of ‘these people’. She discovered that Mr Kane had charged her a nickel for each call he made on her behalf. I explained that this was only fair because he had put a nickel into the slot for each call, but she waved this aside, saying she was sure he made a little something on each call. Why else would he have a phone taking up space in his shop? No, they work every angle, these people, believe me you.