by Trevanian
Mother threw an anxious glance at me then said tentatively to Mrs Meehan, “A-a-h...good afternoon.”
Mrs Meehan grinned and nodded, then she turned and shuffled back to her stoop, where she was met by her flock of babbling children.
We walked on in silence; mine stunned, Mother’s thoughtful, Anne-Marie’s worried. After half a block, Mother said, “I’ll bet I know what that was all about. I wished a good afternoon to her for no reason...just because I was feeling good. But no one ever talks to the Meehans, so she didn’t expect it and didn’t know what to make of it. That’s why she stared at me like that. But after a while, it sank in that I was just being friendly, so she came running after us to say good afternoon back to me.”
“Maybe so. But it could also have something to do with her being a nut.”
“She’s not a real Meehan, you know. She’s the only one of them who isn’t. One of the Meehan men found her in a loony bin where he was doing time, and he brought her home...or so Mrs Kane says. But that could be just a lot of hooey. You’ve got to take everything an old gossip like Mrs Kane says with a dose of salts.8 You know what I bet? I bet Mrs Meehan was brought up around polite people, and she misses it.”
“But she’s the craziest of all the Meehans,” I said. “You don’t want to get mixed up with her.”
“She’s not dangerous, poor thing.”
Anne-Marie and I exchanged glances. We weren’t thinking about danger. We knew that if Mother started having anything to do with the Meehans, the block’s gossips, who already thought she was far too ‘different’, would be confirmed in their belief that she was a borderline crazylady.
After that day, whenever my mother walked downtown, even if she was on our side of the street, the Meehan kids would rush indoors screaming, “The Missus! The Missus!” And Mrs Meehan would appear on her stoop, wiping her hands on a rag or pushing hair out of her eyes. She would grin and wave at Mother, who would call “Good morning!” or “Good afternoon!” and Mrs Meehan would return the greeting, beaming with pleasure as she watched Mother walk down the street for a while before returning to her warren, her day brightened.
• • • • • • • • •
Through determination and invention Mother managed to keep us healthy on $7.27 a week, but when it came to providing the little extras that make life worth living, she had to find occasional part-time work as a waitress, regardless of the risk to her health. The first, and by far the most important, of these life-embracing extras was an extravagance, a beloved extravagance: the Emerson radio that became our principal contact with the great external world of learning and life and love and laughter. One night when she was walking home from a late shift in a hash house where she’d been filling in, my mother spotted the Emerson in the darkened window of a pawn shop on the corner of South Street and Herkimer. The next day, a Sunday, the three of us were returning from Washington Park where there was a wooden four-person ‘gondola’ swing that we could queue up for, then ride it until our arms and legs were heavy with pumping and our heads were light with swooping through the air. Mother brought us home the long way around, down State Street to the closed A-One Pawn Shop, where we stood before the window looking at the radio and imagining all the drama, comedy, music and news that could come pouring out at the click of a switch. We knew about this because we’d had the use of a friend’s radio for a month during our last summer at Lake George Village and we’d spent several hours each day listening to programs coming to us from as far away as Glens Falls and Schenectady. I wondered how much the shopkeeper would ask for this radio, considering that its walnut cabinet was cracked and some of the inlaid bits were missing. I liked its reliable, old-fashioned key-hole shape and its upside-down face with an arched dial of a mouth above two turn-knob eyes. If it had been newer it would probably have been Bakelite molded into that universal design idiom of the ’Thirties: Streamlining. This smooth, swept-back look was logical for automobiles and locomotive engines, but throughout the ’Thirties streamlining was applied to all kinds of products and articles, even the least appropriate: toasters, lamps and handbag clasps were streamlined, as well as bookends, exit signs, money clips, barrettes for girls’ hair, ashtrays, facades of buildings...all sorts of things were designed to come flying at you through the air. No wonder it was a nervous decade.
Mother said we were lucky the radio’s cabinet was old and cracked because that would be useful in bargaining with the pawnbroker, and she knew how to haggle with these people. You had to stand your ground and—
Just then a spring bell above the shop door ping’d as the door opened. “There’s something?” asked the pawnbroker, an old man with a thousand years of craft and suffering in his face and twice that much complaint in his voice. In height, he was about halfway between me and my mother, and he wore a woman’s apron and dust bonnet, presumably his wife’s. I guessed he had been cleaning up his merchandise. My mother told him we were just looking.
“Looking’s free. Enjoy.” And he turned to go back into the shop. My mother tipped me a wink and asked the man how much a pair of binoculars in the window was. (Ah, she doesn’t want him to know she’s really interested in the radio. Crafty.)
The old man smiled at her. “I could have sworn you were looking at the radio. Quality merchandise. Absolutely guaranteed to carry the finest programs available on the airwaves. And all in English for ease of use.”
“Radio?” my mother asked, puzzled. “I didn’t notice any...oh, you mean that one down there? The old one with the broken cabinet?”
“The crack lets the sound out more freely.”
“How much?”
“A bargain at nine dollars.”
Mother sniffed a note of laughter and turned away.
“But for you, lady, seven dollars fifty cents.”
Mother shook her head and made a puffing sound.
“Lookit, lady, I’ll tell you what. Because it’s Sunday and because I’m not officially open for business and because you’re my only customer and because I like the look of your kids and because I’m too softhearted for my own good, I could make it six seventy-five. A penny less and I’m in the poorhouse.”
“Six dollars even.”
“Oy ayoy! Such a stubborn lady! All right, six dollars. But my wife’s a proud woman. She’s going to hate living in the poorhouse. By the way, we’re talking cash here, aren’t we?”
“I get paid at the end of the week.”
“You’re saying you don’t have the cash. Why are you wasting my time like this, lady? What did I ever do to you?”
“I’ll have the money at the end of the week.”
“Lady, I just can’t...! Oh, all right, all right! Come back with the cash at the end of the week. The radio will be waiting for you.”
“Yes, but I need—”
“Don’t even think it, lady.”
“There’s lots of good programs on Sundays, and I—”
“I asked you to don’t even think it.”
“My kids would love to listen to—”
“You’re thinking it, even though I begged you not to!”
“I could give you a dollar right now, and the rest when I get paid at the end—”
“Lookit, lady, I don’t know you from Adam. Or Eve either, for that matter.”
“I’ve never cheated anybody in my life!”
“Who’s talking cheating? A trolley car could hit! The world could come to an end! Things happen!”
“I could make it two dollars down. That’s every last cent of my tip money.”
“Help, somebody. A man’s being robbed here!”
“What do you say?”
“What do I say? I say I’m being robbed. Tell those kids not to look at me like that. Why did I open the door? All right, two dollars down, four fifty at the end of the week.”
“We agreed on six dollars even.”
“That was the cash price. The robbery price is six fifty.”
“All right, it’s a deal.”
“My wife’s going to kill me. Then they’ll send her to prison. First the poorhouse, then prison.”
As we walked home, me carrying the Emerson proudly and Anne-Marie green-lipped from sucking a striped candy stick the shopkeeper had given her, my mother muttered, “You see how he jacked up the price on me at the last minute? They’re all alike.”
I couldn’t believe it. After the way she had whittled him down like that, and the way he’d let us walk away with his radio for only two dollars down. But that’s how she’d been brought up to see things.
We tried to work out a schedule for listening to the radio so we could hear all the best programs without wasting electricity. But in the end we listened greedily and without method because radio not only brought drama, comedy and world events into our lives, but we were also avid followers of the fortunes of the popular tunes that were featured on the weekly Your Lucky Strike Hit Parade. We would cheer the climb of our favorites up the hit-parade ladder, then lament their inevitable decline into the shadows of history.9
As it turned out, the pawnbroker was right when he said that things happen. For one thing, he didn’t get his four fifty at the end of that week as we had promised. Mother fell ill from late hours and overwork, and the manager of the restaurant held back part of her wages because she hadn’t worked the full week. At twenty-five cents a week, it took us more than four months to pay off the four fifty we owed for the radio, and that quarter was enough to strain our budget to the extent of at least one extra day on potato soup each week. But it was worth it. A radio! At the time we got ours, only a few people on our block had radios. When President Roosevelt made a Fireside Chat to the nation we radio owners would put our receivers on the sills of our front windows and turn the volume up, so the people who gathered on the pavement could hear. I used to look down benevolently on the sidewalk listeners we were informing with our Emerson, and I would keep my hand on the volume knob, so everybody knew who was in charge of things.
Each Saturday afternoon Mother would give me a quarter and I would walk all the way down to South Street and Herkimer. The spring bell above the door of the A-One Pawn Shop would ping as I entered, and the old man would always greet me with the same words: “Ah! So you and your mother haven’t run off to Mexico with my radio yet, eh?”
And I would always respond, “No, still here, Mr A-One.”
“Mr A-One! That’s a hot one! Such wit! You should tell jokes on that radio you stole from me on false pretenses.” He would take the quarter and write out my receipt on a scrap of paper which I would put into my shoe for safety because my mother carefully saved all the receipts. You can’t tell with those people.
He would tell me how much we still owed; I’d say: See you next week, Mr A-One; he’d say: Such wit; and I’d open the ping-ing door and start the long walk back home, thinking about the special Saturday night comedy hour with Amos ’n Andy and Fred Allen’s Town Hall Tonight both of which could make my mother laugh until tears stood in her eyes.
It is difficult for the modern reader to appreciate the effect of radio upon the pre-television audience, because the functions and the impact of radio differed from those of television in fundamental ways, not the least of which was the fact that the radio audience was innocent and receptive to a degree unimaginable today.
Introduced on the eve of the Age of the Consumer, television quickly became a throw-away narcotic for the reality-stunned. Its messages bypass the censorship of the brain and are injected directly into the viewer’s central cortex. It is a babbling background irritant to modern life, always present, never significant, except to the lonely, the dim, and the damaged. Radio, on the more joyful hand, engaged us, busied our imaginations, and obliged us to paint its images on the walls of our minds. On radio, a handsome man was your personal image of a handsome man, and a brave woman was your idea of a brave woman, and a beautiful sunset was your sunset, your beauty. News broadcasts were gritty, immediate and potent, science was fascinating and significant, humor was side-splitting, drama touched our hearts, and the adventure programs, particularly those directed at children, were the very stuff of daydreams: absorbing, involving, challenging, frightening and totally satisfying. (If you were a boy, that is. It must be admitted that radio drama arrived in an era when the female character was still limited largely to romantic and domestic settings, which is too bad, because few women look back on radio with the affection men feel, and one cannot blame them.) I used to stand before our Emerson for hours, one foot hooked behind the other ankle, my eyes defocused, thoughtlessly tearing up little bits of paper as my imagination battened on the radio as on an unending flow of ambrosia, food for the mind and the soul that sustained you when you needed support, exercised you when your emotions or intellect were flabby and cosseted you when you needed rest and escape.10 And radio was a liberator. For me, radio was the quickest way out of North Pearl Street. And that was important because I was chilled by a nagging fear that I might end up on public support the rest of my life until, like most of the people on my block, I became so spiritually enfeebled that I lost all dignity, grit and ambition and came to view the dole not only as a necessary condition of existence but as a basic civil right.
But Mother was determined to save my sister and me from accepting the values and limitations of North Pearl Street as our own, and radio wasn’t her only means of accomplishing this. On Saturday afternoons when admission was free, she would pack a lunch (usually bean sandwiches) and take us for an enlightening visit to the Schuyler Mansion. Confident that her French ancestry, however distant, endowed her with innate good taste, she would openly criticize the decor of the rooms, describing what colors she would have used, or what fabrics, and I would cringe at the stares she collected from the tight-lipped volunteer guides. It never occurred to me to doubt my mother’s aesthetic judgment, I only wished she expressed it less freely...and loudly. But she thought it was best to be frank with people who were in error. How else would they learn? On those weekdays when there was no school because of religious holidays, we would walk up State Street to the Natural History Museum to broaden our understanding of the world and its wonders by standing in awe beneath the high-arching skeleton of a dinosaur held up by a metal armature; or, wandering alone through those vast halls, we would gaze at the realistic woodland dioramas of plaster Indians sitting around glowing lightbulb fires, or we would peer down into glass display cases, browsing on such scientific wonders as birds’ eggs, ore samples and arrowheads, and Mother and I would take turns reading the inscriptions in half-whispers that hissed in the echoing marble corridors.
On Sundays, when the weather permitted, we would walk all the way up to Washington Park to eat our sandwiches beside the little lake before going over to the big four-man wooden ‘gondola’ swings. Anne-Marie and I would sit on one side facing Mother, who would push the bottom bar with her feet and pull the crossbar with her arms until we got the considerable bulk swinging, slowly at first because our legs were too short to help much, then faster and higher as Mother pumped harder and harder until we swung high enough to rock and shake the framework. At the apex of the swing, our stomachs went weightless and Anne-Marie and I giggled helplessly, then we swooped down through space and our stomachs rose within us as fright moistened our palms and weakened our grips on the crossbar. One of the old men who served as park wardens would shout up at us not to swing so high, and Mother would laugh and shout down to him: go to hell! and he would shake his head and go away muttering. Just as her encounters with the guides at the Schuyler Mansion left me proud of her refined taste but uncomfortable about her willingness to share it, so these confrontations with park authority made me proud of her feisty independence and yet embarrassed. You shouldn’t swear at old men.
Washington Park’s wide lanes were tended by WPA crews that wandered thro
ugh, each man taking personal responsibility for picking up five leaves. The late-Victorian esplanade had been laid out as an ambulatory park for ‘promenading’, which Mother, who read historical novels and knew about such things, described as a social ritual in which pairs of snappy young men in boaters and candy-striped blazers strolled along in the hope of meeting two modern young women in wasp-waisted, pigeon-breasted Gibson-girl dresses walking in the opposite direction, arm in arm. Nods and half bows might be exchanged the second time around, and perhaps a smile or even a word the third. And if, by astonishing coincidence, they met again the following week, who knows? Names might be exchanged. Snappy sayings might be produced and laughed at. Dynasties have been founded on such oblique negotiations between urgent genes.
Washington Park was my favorite of Mother’s no-cost cultural expeditions designed to remind us that there was a world beyond North Pearl Street, so it was natural that I usually ended up there the handful of times I played hooky from school, which I did for the thrill of wrongdoing, or out of boredom when I knew that a teacher would be grinding her way for the third, fourth, fifth time through some matter that was self-evident to anyone with an IQ larger than his shoe size. I also played hooky out of duty to my self-image as a real boy, in imitation of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s Bad Boy.11 As with so many social trespasses, most of the fun of playing hooky was in the planning and anticipation...in fact, just about all of it, because there was almost nothing that a boy wandering alone on a school day through strange streets and back alleys could find to do, with no destination, no money, and not daring to come too near his own neighborhood for fear of being recognized and reported to his mother. The night before, I would make up story games about the adventures a lone boy prowling through the city might get involved in. Most of these came from books and radio and had to do with foiling crooks, spies, blackmailers or kidnappers. Unfortunately, the heroes in the books were always big, brave, handsome crack shots, so I was obliged to work out story games in which my advantage as a crime fighter lay in my having the appearance of a skinny little kid, so no one suspected me of being, in fact, a heroic protector of the oppressed and the endangered. The basic lead-in to my adventures would be something like this: I’m wandering down some street, and a beautiful woman rushes out onto her stoop and looks desperately up and down the street for a kid; and I’m the only kid around because it’s a school day. The reason she needs a kid is that she can’t get into her apartment because (a) she has lost her keys, (b) some cruel guy has locked her out, (c) it isn’t her apartment, but that of a fear-crazed friend who has telephoned, begging her to rush over and help her, but when she got to the friend’s apartment, the door was locked and no one responded to her frantic knocking. There is a narrow transom above the door that a kid might be able to squeeze through, and that’s why she so desperately needs a kid, particularly a skinny kid. Well, I would set my lunch bucket aside and roll up my sleeves, and the beautiful woman would interlace her fingers and I’d put my foot into the hand-stirrup and she’d boost me up and I’d wriggle through the transom, drop down on the inside and open the door. And from there the adventure took any of a hundred paths, all of which ultimately led to the bad guys being thwarted (‘thwarted’ and ‘foiled’ were verbs applied only to villains), and in the end the beautiful woman invited me to drop in any time I wanted to sit by the fire in their richly appointed salon and read any book in their huge library while I nibbled on the delicious things their servants left out for me. I don’t remember any romantic enticements—I was, after all, only seven when these story games began—so I don’t know why the heroines were always beautiful. Just narrative convention, I guess.