The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

by Trevanian

  So now I was going to be a businessman? Just when the example of Miss Cox had persuaded me to devote my life to teaching?

  Even after the tests, I didn’t think of myself as particularly gifted. I was smart, sure. Smarter than anyone I knew. But then, I lived on North Pearl Street and went to P.S. 5. What kind of standard was that to measure myself against? My idea of a gifted person was one who could think up new inventions, new methods, new systems, and that wasn’t me. I wasn’t so much intelligent as quick-minded. More than half the class would get the right answer to the mathematical word problems. My answers weren’t any more correct than theirs, it was just that I got them while Miss Cox was still dictating the problems. If I had a gift I was proud of, it wasn’t ‘intelligence’, it was my ability to create situations and characters for the story games I constructed from fragments of reading and, later, from adventure programs I heard on that most absorbing and evocative of all media, radio.

  One morning during that winter vacation the mailman brought a letter addressed to me. The first letter I ever received. It was a Christmas card from Miss Cox, a snowy old-fashioned street scene with smiling people and kids skating on skates with blades that curled up in front, the kind of card that is appropriate for people of all religions, or none. Inside she wrote: ‘To Jean-Luc. Your quick understanding and intelligent questions make teaching a pleasure. And a challenge, too!” My mother read the note and beamed. “I’ll bet you’re her pet. Why else would she send you a Christmas card?” I shrugged, embarrassed but pleased. I was later to learn that she sent cards to all of her students, each with an appropriate supportive message.

  Mother had found split-shift work in two restaurants during that Christmas season, so she was able to afford special gifts for us: an expensive doll for Anne-Marie that could wet its diapers as it emptied its bottle (girls’ toys are so dumb!), and for me a three-volume compendium called High School Subjects Self-Taught that offered condensed courses on everything from Astronomy and Biology to World History and Zoology. At first, I felt ambivalent about this present that was so obviously intended to move me along more quickly to the time when I could get out into the commercial world and drag that damned ship into port. But I became intrigued by the self-graded tests at the back of the book that you could rip out along dotted lines and mail to the publishers together with five dollars in cash or stamps, and they’d send you an embossed imitation parchment high school diploma issued by the fully accredited American National High School Association, which had the same address as the publisher. Any fear that dishonest people might cheapen the value of this diploma by looking up the test answers in the book was dispelled by a notice declaring that ‘these tests must be taken in accordance with the strictest Honor System, which obliges all candidates for a diploma to act fairly and honorably.’ Well, you can’t ask for more protection than that. I worked it out that if I applied my newly discovered IQ to this book with diligence, I could get a high school diploma by the time I was ten, finish college at fourteen and, if I fulfilled my mother’s wish that I become a doctor, I should be ready to perform my first brain surgery at the age of nineteen.

  I could have used my potential medical skills a little earlier because the stress and fatigue of working late shifts in those restaurants night after night, then walking home through the snow and slush to save the trolley car money had the usual effect of giving my mother a terrible cold, and she passed Christmas Day in bed with chills and fever, and me doctoring her with aspirin and mustard plasters so hot that they burned my fingers, so I’d plop them quickly onto her bare back. She had a particularly hard night, hacking and coughing, gasping for breath as she hung over the edge of her bed to help the phlegm ‘come up’, a process that tested the limits of my squeamishness. I sat on the edge of her bed, trying to relieve her wracking cough by rubbing her back with Balm Bengu. (As a little kid I had marveled at how Dr. Bengu managed to sign each and every tube, and later I was embarrassed at having been so gullible.)

  Late one night, after Anne-Marie had gone to bed with her incontinent doll and my mother had finally fallen into a shallow, rasping sleep, I opened High School Subjects Self-Taught and began to learn those random, unconnected facts that have clung to my memory ever since: the Great Wall of China was begun by Shih Huang-ti, Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome on Christmas Day of 800 AD, sulfuric acid is H2SO4, the three kinds of solid-state carbon fuel are peat, lignite and anthracite. Although age and illness now cause me to forget things that happened yesterday, hundreds of facts gleaned from that book more than sixty years ago are still with me. I even remember where they were on the page.

  I stayed home taking care of my mother for two weeks after Christmas vacation was over. When she was well enough for me to leave her bedside and go back to P.S. 5, I found Miss Cox’s room stripped of its decorations, its blackboard aphorisms, the swatches of bright cloth and paper, the inspirational objets trouvs. Even the piano and the fascinatingly complex orrery were gone. Miss Cox was dead.

  What?

  She’s dead.

  ...Dead?...

  ...and in her place was a dry-voiced man with pallid, rain-colored eyes and creases of bitterness at the corners of his mouth. He stood looking out over our heads as our slant-eyed principal explained to the class that Miss Cox had been in a glee club that dressed up in old-fashioned costumes every Christmas and sang carols on downtown street corners, urging passing shoppers to donate for Christmas baskets for the poor. Miss Cox had caught a cold which had developed into pneumonia and...

  ...Dead? Just like that? I could not believe it.

  In the middle of that afternoon, I slammed my book shut, suddenly angry. Why did people have to die? Like my grandfather had died that Christmas two years earlier when his car skidded off the road in a blizzard! And like my mother might die with her next bout of lung fever, leaving Anne-Marie and me alone!

  The new teacher asked me why I wasn’t copying the arithmetic problems on the board. I didn’t answer. He leaned over my desk and in a cigarette-smelling hiss said that the principal had told him I was Miss Cox’s favorite—high IQ and all that—but to him, a pupil was just a pupil. He didn’t have pets. Did I understand that?

  I looked up at him. Then, without answering, I turned my eyes and looked out the window.

  Aware that the class compared him unfavorably with Miss Cox, the new teacher—my memory does him the favor of not retaining his name—often sneered at the unorthodox methods of the eccentric woman he had replaced. Under his firm hand the big boys crammed into little desks at the back of the room soon reverted to their sullen, class-distracting ways, and he told me that he couldn’t understand how I had been Miss Cox’s pet, considering that I never raised my hand to answer questions, hardly ever did my homework, and wasted the class’s time with my wisecracks and skylarking. One day he said something snide about his predecessor’s peculiar belief that funny clothes made the creative teacher. I got up and walked out of class, while he called after me: Come back here! You just come right back, you hear me?

  I spent a fair amount of that year sitting on a bench outside the principal’s office, awaiting punishment, and I went into the fourth grade with lower than average grades. By the time I passed on to the fifth, my chronic daydreaming, my satiric sallies at the expense of teachers who got a fact wrong or mispronounced a word, and my new-found role as class clown made me even more dreaded than the often-flunked kids who threatened the peace of the class from their desks at the back of the room. So much for the 200 IQ.

  I have often wondered what happened to Miss Cox’s intricate orrery. Old pale-eyes probably threw it out, the turd.

  $7.27 a Week

  AID TO Dependent Children paid a ‘rent allowance’ of twenty dollars a month directly to our faceless slum landlord instead of giving us the money and letting us negotiate for our own accommodation. This bound every family on welfare to one of the ‘designated’ landlords, whi
ch made bargaining impossible. But then as now the Lords of Poverty didn’t trust the poor not to squander their money. I need hardly add that slum property owners were expected to respond to the fund-raising solicitations of the party machine in return for being ‘designated’. In Albany at that time, these slum landlords were not, as they would be today, large development companies squeezing a few dollars out of the poor while they waited for the tides of fashion to bring the comfortable classes back in search of inner-city re-colonization. Our landlords were petty nickel-and-dime entrepreneurs who seldom owned more than four or five buildings broken up and cheaply remodeled into apartments.

  Our three-room first-floor apartment rented for twenty-five dollars a month, which meant that we had to find five dollars each month to fill the gap between our rent allowance and our actual rent. Each week, a dollar and a quarter had to come out of our seven dollars and twenty-seven cents for this purpose. Actually, because our rent was monthly and our living allowance was weekly, there were four weeks in each year when we could put that dollar and a quarter to other purposes, and that’s the kind of thing you look forward to when your budget is as tight as ours.

  So after setting our rent supplement aside, our allowance of seven dollars and twenty-seven cents per week was really six dollars and two cents, which had to cover not only food and clothing, but also hundreds of necessities that go unnoticed by those who do not have to count every penny: soap, medications, ice for the icebox, towels, clothes pins, baking powder, tooth powder, roach powder, soap powder, matches, fly paper, toilet paper, waxed paper, writing paper, lightbulbs, fuses, envelopes, thread...all of which my mother managed on less than thirty-five cents per person per day. We inched along on the tightrope of our budget, teetering from week to week, but the end of every month brought us a blow that buckled our knees and made us wobble precariously: the gas and electric bills. (In my day northeasterners spoke of the ‘electric’, not the ‘electricity’. Perhaps they still do.) Mother kept our heads above water, or at least our upturned mouths, but making it through the week required strict planning, stretching every nickel, a Spartan diet and, above all, no bad luck. ‘Bad luck’ meant anything getting lost or broken, for any unforeseen need could cause our fragile financial raft to founder, leaving us no option but to economize the only place we could...food. My mother never let us go hungry, but variety often had to be sacrificed. Every month there were at least five or six days when we had potato soup for dinner and supper. Our budget was so tight that it took her all that first summer and well into the fall before she could to pay off our slate at Mr Kane’s cornerstore. In fact, I’m not sure that we ever paid him off totally. Like everyone else on the block, we were always a week or so behind, and every time we almost closed the gap, something would happen to set us back. Mr Kane was gracious about extending credit and never once pressed us for payment, and he was helpful in a hundred ways when my mother was learning the ropes of life on welfare, but inevitably she came to share the block’s feeling that Mr Kane profited from our poverty and misfortune.

  My mother’s imagination was fertile when it came to making our money stretch. She had dozens of ways to make something ‘do’ for another week or month. Skillful with a needle, she could darn and re-darn our socks without making the heel or toe uncomfortably thick; and there were strict rules requiring us to think ahead when we used the icebox in summer, picturing where things were stored, then opening the door, grabbing what we wanted, and closing it quickly, so we didn’t waste ice. We always saved the boxes our shoes came in because shoeboxes could be mined for two pieces of cardboard (top and bottom) that were just the right size for cutting out ‘insoles’ that would extend the life of worn-out shoes an extra couple of weeks, unless you were unlucky or careless enough to step into a rain puddle, which would turn the cardboard into a pulpy wad. Clothing and shoes were always bought a size or two too big because it would be a crying shame if we out-grew anything before we wore it out.

  In working out our weekly menu my mother displayed a knowledge of good nutrition that was rare in that era, and she had a gift for creating variety, or at least a sense of variety, out of very little. Our big meal was in the evening, except for Sundays, when it was at midday. She carefully planned each week’s meals around three basic ‘baked dishes’: tuna fish casserole, corned beef loaf, and vegetable ‘surprise’, each of which was made to last for two meals. She bought the canned meat for these dishes and the bones for soup stock as soon as the check came in, and only then did she feel safe about feeding us that week. This meant, of course, that we only rarely ate butchers’ meat...two or three times a year, at most. To save on gas, she would prepare two dishes and put them into the oven together, and to avoid monotony she would serve half of each baked dish on alternate nights. For Saturdays she made Boston baked beans with a small piece of salt pork if we could afford it, without if not, and there was always enough left over for baked bean sandwiches to take to school on Monday and Wednesday, once again trying to avoid having the same thing twice in a row. Occasionally our budget let her replace one of the baked dishes with a special Sunday dinner of what she called chicken ‘frigazee’. She would go down to the open-air market at Washington Street and buy a tough ‘boiling chicken’ (euphemism for a layer that had entered menopause) which she cut up and stewed with potatoes, onions and carrots until it was tender, then she thickened the broth with flour, topped the dish with baking powder biscuit dough, and put it into the oven. The biscuit crust soaked up enough chicken gravy to stretch the frigazee through to Monday’s supper as well. But when things ‘went wrong’ (something had to be replaced or repaired, or clothing was needed, or medicine) then one or even both of the baked dishes had to be scrapped and potato soup was called on to fill the gap, usually for two days, occasionally for four. Fortunately, I particularly liked potato soup, and still do to this day. Mother varied our vegetables as much as she could, buying whatever was in season and cheap. We always arrived at the Washington Street Market half an hour before closing time so she could bargain with stall-owners who didn’t want to have to take unsold vegetables back with them. The remaining produce had been picked over, of course, but Mother would cut out the bad bits and prepare the vegetables so you couldn’t tell. She even varied the three casseroles, sometimes making them with rice and sometimes with macaroni, sometimes with cream of mushroom soup as ‘binder’, more often without.

  Luckily, the ingredients for our safety-net potato soup were often to be had free at the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation warehouse. The welfare people had issued us a green ‘two children’ card, and once every two weeks for eight years and in all weathers, I walked the twenty-two blocks north to the FSCC warehouse and twenty-two blocks back pulling my sister’s rattling, loosely jointed wagon containing our ration of whatever was on offer from crops the New Deal government had bought from farmers. Thousands of tons of food were destroyed to keep it from flooding the market and undermining the farmers’ already low prices, but a portion was given out to the poor on the assumption that this would not harm the farmers’ markets because the poor couldn’t have afforded to buy it anyway. We never saw people from Pearl Street at the FSCC warehouse, in part because they were too lazy to walk over forty blocks for handouts, and in part because the technology of dehydration was in its infancy and few people knew what to do with the dried potatoes, onions and milk, as they were all nearly inedible in the state in which we received them.

  My mother’s determination that her children should have wholesome food inspired her to invent ways to use the dried potato flakes which, when mixed with water, produced a glutinous, un-swallowable paste, and the dried onions that rattled into the dish like flakes of granite, and the dried milk powder that could be broken down only by the hours of simmering necessary to make her potato soup. Oh, and powdered eggs! I’d forgotten those powdered eggs that were even more stubbornly insoluble than the dried milk. Adding water to the dried eggs in the hope of getting something
usable was hopeless. Regardless of how long or fast you stirred and whipped, the end product would be a bowl of dirty water upon which floated frothy globs of yellowish powder, and any effort to fry or boil the ugly mush produced a ghastly sulfuric smell that made most people give up experimenting. But Mother found a way to use both the dried eggs and the dried milk to give us additional nutrition. When both were in their relatively mixable and un-smelly dry states, she would blend them with flour to make healthful, if stodgy, pancakes for cold winter mornings. They didn’t taste all that bad, but they took a bit of swallowing. My mother did everything she could to save us from the undernourishment that was so widespread in the Depression ’Thirties that our generation was shorter on average by an inch and a quarter than the generations that preceded and followed us, generations that had the same genes as we, but were raised in more affluent times.

  In addition to dried foods whose insolubility would challenge the most resolute and resourceful alchemist, there were sometimes welcome surprises at the FSCC warehouse, such as split peas or dried beans when pulses were flooding the market, or two-pound bags of flour from which baking-powder biscuits could be made, and sometimes there were dried apples that Mother made into applesauce or, after soaking them overnight, apple pies. A man at the warehouse door would punch our green ‘two children’ card to make sure we didn’t get more than our allotted share of free food.

  • • • • • • • • •

  One afternoon, Mother, Anne-Marie and I were going downtown for something. Mother was humming to herself, brimming with energy and cheer. She had recently recovered from a bout of depression and was in the high spirits that always followed an extended session of the blues. We passed the three buildings that were the Meehan warren and Mrs Meehan was sitting on a stoop surrounded by a shoal of kids, the same kids we had seen the day we arrived on Pearl Street, swarming around her, begging her to let go of the skillet. When Mother smiled at her and said, “Good afternoon,” Mrs Meehan glared at us and scowled. We had walked on a distance when I heard slapping footsteps behind us and turned to see the crazy Mrs Meehan bearing down on us in her crushed-down-heels slippers. My first impulse was to run, pulling Anne-Marie and Mother after me. But Mother turned and stood her ground, and Mrs Meehan caught up with us, panting and gasping. Anne-Marie slipped behind me. When Mrs Meehan caught her breath, she said, “Good afternoon, Missus!”