The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

by Trevanian

  I had stopped in the alley to shift books from one hip to the other when three sharp clicks on a window above made me look up. Mrs McGivney was gesturing for me to come up. I indicated the books I was carrying and tried to mime the complicated message that I had to bring them to the library before it closed. But she just smiled and tilted her head in that little-girl way of hers and beckoned me up, so I reluctantly returned the books to my apartment and went down the street, up her stoop, and up the staircase to the top floor.

  Again the cookies and milk; again her wistful smiles, again Mr McGivney sitting perfectly still with the low evening sunlight caught in his fine white hair. But this time I was determined to uncover the facts about his heroism. I decided to try the double-bluff of a subtly deceptive direct approach. “Mrs McGivney, how did Mr McGivney become a hero?”

  She seemed pleased that I was interested enough to ask. “Mr McGivney was a soldier. He fought the Spanish in Cuba.”

  Now we were getting somewhere! A war hero! I had read a short story about the Spanish–American War called ‘Message to Garcia’, but it wasn’t a war that inspired novels and movies, like the Civil War and the Great War. “When was the Spanish–American War, Mrs McGivney?”

  “He left to join his regiment the day after we were married. The Shamrock Regiment, it was. Most of the boys in the Shamrock Regiment came from New York City and only a few from up-state. He looked so grand and handsome in his uniform!”

  “Yes, sure, but when was that?”

  “I’ll bet half the people on the block came to our wedding. It was up at Saint Joseph’s. Do you know Saint Joseph’s?”

  Saint Joseph’s was our block’s parish church where I would eventually become an altar boy, but at that time my only religious distinction was my ability to get through the Stations of the Cross faster than any other kid on the street. None of us would have dared to skip a single word of the five Hail, Marys we said at each stage of the Passion, nor would we have failed to bow our heads at the word ‘Jesus’, but we saw nothing wrong in saying the prayers as fast as we could, rising from one Station while still muttering nowandatthehourofourdeathamen, then sliding into the next on our knees and beginning its string of Aves before we’d come to a complete stop. And we would never have dreamed of failing to genuflect as we crossed the central aisle to get to the second half of the Stations, but we sometimes did it so quickly that one kid sometimes got a bruised knee.

  “So you got married at Saint Joseph’s, eh?” I made a mental note of this. Where they got married didn’t seem important, but you never know. In an investigation of this kind the smallest detail might turn out to be the key that unlocks the...

  “We stood there at the altar, him in his uniform and me in my mother’s wedding dress. It was all so beautiful. I was just nineteen, and Mr McGivney was twenty-three.”

  “And this was...when, exactly?”

  “September. September weddings are good luck, you know.”

  “Yes, but what year!...Oh, I’m sorry. I mean, what year were you married, Mrs McGivney?”

  “Eighteen ninety-eight. That’s when our boys went to Cuba.”

  1898. Another century! But then—let’s see—if she was nineteen in 1898, and this was 1939, that would make her about sixty. That was pretty old, sure, but not impossible. Still, it seemed strange to think that this old man had fought in the war before the Great War. The Great War had started when my mother was only about my age, for crying out loud.

  “So he was wounded doing something brave in Cuba?” I asked.

  “No, he wasn’t wounded. I don’t know exactly what happened. And, of course, he wasn’t able to tell me, because he’s...” She lifted her shoulders. “...well...like he is.” After a moment, she continued in a distant voice, as though tenderly fingering the old memories. “I moved into this apartment right after seeing him off at Union Station. All the boys in uniform...a band playing...people waving and cheering. I made this little nest for Lawrence to come back to.” She rose and started to walk around the room, touching things. “I ran up these curtains myself, and found furniture in second-hand stores, and my father helped me paint—he was a house painter by profession, you know—and I chose this paper for the parlor. Do you like the color? Ashes of Rose, they called it.” She took a hairbrush from the sideboard and stood behind her husband, lightly brushing his white hair, while he sat bathed in the westering sun that filtered through the lace curtain. “I wrote to Lawrence every day, telling him how our apartment was coming along. He wrote every day too, but his letters used to come in clumps, nine or ten at a time. That’s how the mail comes when a person’s in the Army. In clumps. Then...then his letters stopped coming, and there was no word for a long time...more than a month.” She lifted her brush and looked down upon his fine hair. “I was so worried...so frightened. I asked Mr O’Brien if he could find out why the letters weren’t coming through. Mr O’Brien the mailman? Then this letter came from the government, and I was afraid to open it. Everybody on the block knew I had a government letter because Mr O’Brien told them. Mr O’Brien was...” Her voice drifted away and she stood there, frowning into the corner of the room.

  “...Mr O’Brien was your mailman,” I prompted.

  “What? Oh, yes, that’s right...our mailman. My mother and father came and asked what the news was. I told them I hadn’t dared to open the letter. My father said I was acting silly. I might as well know one way or the other, and there was no point in putting it off. But I didn’t want to know, not right at that moment. So my father said he’d open the letter for me, but I said no! No, Lawrence was my husband, and it was my duty to open the letter. ...When I was ready.”

  Tears stood in her pale blue eyes, and her voice had become tense and thin as she re-lived standing up to her domineering old-country father, probably for the first time ever, telling him that Lawrence was her husband and she would open the letter when she was ready.

  She blinked back tears and looked across at me. “You know what? I believe that was the first time I ever said the word ‘husband’ aloud. I always called him Lawrence, of course. His friends called him Larry, but not me. I was his wife, so I always called him Lawrence. I wasn’t used to saying his name aloud. We’d only been married four months, and I’d been busy fixing up our home, so I didn’t see many people or have much chance to talk about my husband...my husband...husband.” As she savored the word, she began brushing his hair again.

  I sat watching her brush his hair while he gazed, empty-eyed, at the roofscape beyond his window. Then his flat, pale cheek trembled! His lips drew back in an unconscious rictus that revealed long yellow teeth, but the eyes remained dead.

  A sharp breath caught in my throat. “Mrs McGivney...he just...he...!”

  She nodded. “I know. He sometimes smiles when I brush his hair. Lawrence loves having his hair brushed.”

  Well, it didn’t look like a smile to me. He looked like a man in terrible pain hissing out a silent scream through his teeth. Not daring to look away, I watched as, with a slight quiver, his cheeks relaxed, the grin collapsed, the teeth disappeared, and he was again looking out through the lace curtain, his eyes empty.

  It was a couple of minutes before my heart stopped thudding in my chest. I wanted to get out of there, but a private investigator working for Mr Keene, Tracer of Lost Persons, doesn’t turn tail and run. I drew a deep breath and said, “This...ah...this letter you got from the government. It said he was a hero, did it?”

  “Yes, a hero.”

  “What had he done?”

  “It was from his commanding officer—Captain Francis Murphy? He regretted having to tell me that Private Lawrence McGivney had contracted an illness in the performance of duty. He was in a military hospital and would soon be shipped home so he could get every care and comfort. I remember the exact words...every care and comfort. And that’s what I’ve tried to give him. Captain Murphy went on to say
that Private McGivney was a cheerful and willing soldier and that he was well liked by everybody in the regiment. Think of that! The whole regiment.”

  Being liked by everybody is fine, but it isn’t quite the same thing as being a hero. But I didn’t say anything.

  And for a while Mrs McGivney didn’t say anything either. She stood there brushing her husband’s hair, a fond smile in her eyes as she seemed to re-read the letter from his captain in her mind. Then she blinked and focused on me. “You know what I’d bet? I’d bet dollars to doughnuts you’d like another cookie. Am I right?” She looked at me out of the sides of her eyes in that coy Shirley Temple way.

  “No, thanks, I—”

  But she shook her finger at me. “Now don’t tell me you can’t eat another cookie. A boy can always make space for another cookie.”

  As she went for the cookie jar on the counter I asked, “What was Mr McGivney sick with?”

  “Brain fever,” she said. “He ran this terribly high fever for days and days, lying in his bunk, sweating and shivering. The doctor at the veterans’ hospital over in Troy—Doctor French?—he told us that most men would have died.” She brought back one of her little decorated plates with a cookie on it and set it before me. She still had the hairbrush in her hand. The long white hairs entangled in its bristles made me shudder. “Doctor French said that Lawrence had fought a heroic battle against the fever, and survived!”

  Oh. So that was the kind of hero he was.

  “But...” She sighed. “The fever left him...well, like he is.”

  “And you’ve taken care of him ever since?”

  She smiled. “I wash him and feed him and...everything. He likes it when I brush his hair. He doesn’t say anything, but I can tell by the way he sometimes smiles.”

  So she had lived alone with him up here for more than forty years, feeding him and cleaning him and brushing his hair. Forty years. So long that the existence of Mr McGivney had dropped out of the collective memory of the block, which now thought of Mrs McGivney, when it thought of her at all, as a shy old spinster crazylady. But she thought of herself as the bride who had made a cozy nest for her soldier bridegroom.

  I started to ask if she didn’t get lonely, up here all day without anyone to talk—but a child’s instinct for social peril stopped me short. Of course she got lonely! That’s why I was sitting there, eating explosive cookies. That’s why she gave me a whole nickel for buying a pickle. That’s why she had given me a look of such intense gratitude the other day. I could sense the trap closing. I should never have asked her about her husband. Now that I knew how lonely she was, now that I’d seen tears in her eyes, I’d feel obliged to come whenever she tapped at her window with that nickel, and to sit with her and listen to her talk about how her husband liked it when she turned on the gaslight or brushed his hair. Another responsibility in my life. And sometimes when I dared to glance over, he’d be grinning his silent scream of a smile. Right then and there I decided I’d better stay out of the alley altogether for at least a week to get her used to not seeing me and depending on me.

  It was during that week of weaning Mrs McGivney off me that my life lurched out of balance because a tube in our radio burnt out. A new one would cost a dollar and a quarter, and there wasn’t enough money in the Dream Bank, so I had to go without the daily hour of those reality-blocking adventure programs that had become essential to my well-being. And this just when all the stories were at their most exciting and dangerous moments—or so it seemed to me.

  Mother was furious because we’d only had the radio for three years. I reminded her that it had been second-hand—maybe fifth-hand—when we bought it, but she said we’d been robbed and she’d be goddamned if she was going to let them get away with it! She was sick and tired of everybody always taking advantage of her! Her French-’n’-Indian temper carried her out of her sick bed and down to the A-One Pawn Shop where we had bought the radio. I went with her, trying to calm her down all the way, but she stormed into the shop and slammed the radio down on the counter. I winced at the possibility of additional damage. The old pawnshop keeper came out from the back room. “Can I help—oh, it’s the lady who drives such hard bargains over radios. Help, I’m going to be robbed!”

  I tried to be friendly. “Good afternoon, Mr A-One.”

  “And the boy with the sense of humor. Help, I’m going to be bored!”

  I turned away, embarrassed by the scene I knew would follow. Mother told him that the tube had burnt out and she asked what he was going to do about it. He shrugged. “Lookit, lady, it’s an old radio. Tubes burn out. That’s life.” Well, she wanted him to put in a new one and right now, because her boy was missing his programs! The pawnbroker said he’d end up in the poorhouse if he gave everybody tubes every time they burnt out, but here’s what he could do. He could give us a new tube for a quarter down and a quarter a week until it was paid for. How was that? Mother took back the radio and said, “To hell with you, mister! This is the last time we do business with your sort!” And she stormed out. I smiled weakly at the man. He thrust out his lower lip and lifted both shoulders and palms in an ancient gesture of fatalism, and I had to run to catch up with my mother, who was steaming up the street towards home in a rage, muttering that she’d be goddamned if her boy would go without his radio programs because of a lousy buck and a quarter. She’d get a job in some goddamned hash-house to pay for the goddamned thing! I reminded her that she was still weak from her recent lung attack, but she said her kids had just as much right to listen to the radio as the kids of any snooty hoi polloi bastard that works in some bank! She knew how much the radio meant to me, and she’d get that tube if it killed her!

  Then I got angry. So it would be my fault if she got sick and died and Anne-Marie and I ended up in the orphanage! I told her to forget the radio. I didn’t want the radio! I was sick of the radio! I didn’t care if I never heard a radio again! She told me to shut up! Shut up! Shut up! And I said I wouldn’t shut up!...but I did, and we continued home, walking fast in the hot silence of rage.

  When we slammed into our apartment, Anne-Marie knew things had gone badly. She shot me a scared look and begged Mother to go back to bed and rest so she wouldn’t get sick again. Mother started on the ‘I’ll be goddamned if my kids...’ routine, but I interrupted her, saying that she didn’t have to worry about the damned tube anymore. I had a plan for getting the money. She asked what I had in mind, but I said it was a secret. With one of her sudden mood shifts, she took Anne-Marie onto her lap and started re-braiding her hair. I went into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub, the only place in our little apartment where I could be alone to think. I had succeeded in shutting Mother up by telling her I had a plan to get the money; now all I had to do was think up some sort of plan.

  When I came back into our kitchen I had a plan...of sorts. Soon Mother was back in bed, braced up by pillows, and we were playing pinochle on the covers while Anne-Marie, dressmaker-to-the-stars, sat at the foot of the bed, murmuring soothing assurances to a movie actress who needed something really spectacular to wear to the Oscar Awards. Mother’s rages were always brief. I think she knew how stomach-wrenching they were for us because afterwards she always tried to be lighthearted and fun. That night she told us about some of the wild stunts she had got up to when she was a kid, and Anne-Marie and I laughed harder than the stories deserved, because we were so relieved.

  After Mother and Anne-Marie were asleep, I borrowed my sister’s crayons and drew a sign on a piece of cardboard box. I was going into the transportation business in conjunction with a grocery that had just opened in a long-empty store two blocks down the street.

  The spanking new red-and-gold sign above the grocery read: The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, a name that evoked books about the South Seas: cruel planters and vengeful natives, tall-masted sailing ships and sad-eyed captains who had gone to the East to forget. The new A&P was the product o
f a brief Depression-years experiment with small A&Ps that the company called ‘neighborhood stores’. Their prices were only slightly lower than in cornerstores, but you were allowed to walk around and pick out your own cans and fruit and everything, which was a novelty at that time. Also, there were intriguing new foods, like maple syrup that came in a can shaped like a log cabin. You poured it out of the chimney and when it was empty you could use the cabin as a toy or a bank. And there were three kinds of coffee that they let you grind for yourself in machines, choosing between drip grind, percolator grind, and ‘regular’ (whatever that was). The newly ground coffee gave off so delicious an aroma that you closed your eyes and just breathed it in. The most expensive coffee was called Bokar, a name redolent of Africa so it was right that the bag should be black; the middle-priced one, Red Dot, came in a yellow bag with a red dot; we always bought the cheapest coffee, Eight O’Clock, which came in a red bag. I used to wonder if the Bokar could possibly taste as good as it smelled. But no coffee tastes as good as it smells: an apt metaphor for the gap between anticipation and realization. The new store’s cheaper prices and wider selection attracted everyone for blocks around, but you couldn’t charge things there so, in the end, Mr Kane’s slate won out over the A&P’s novelty and economy, and like other experimental ‘neighborhood’ A&Ps around the nation, it closed within the year.

  The morning after our Emerson blew its tube, I was standing outside the miniature A&P with my sister’s battered old cart and a cardboard sign with bold red crayon letters informing shoppers of my willingness to bring their groceries home for 5. That first day and the next, half a dozen old ladies used my services. I walked them home, pulling their bags of groceries in Anne-Marie’s cart and chatting in the polite, cheerful way I thought likely to inspire them to tip me a couple of cents in addition to my nickel, but none did. Every one of those women lived blocks and blocks away from the A&P, and I had to lug their bags to apartments on the upper floors, leaving the cart in the first-floor hallway so nobody would steal it. I couldn’t believe the rotten luck of every single one of my customers being an old woman who lived far from the A&P and on an upper story of her building, and each of them too cheap to give a friendly, smiling guy a tip. What were the odds? It took me a while to work out that this wasn’t a matter of bad luck. Only women who were so poor they couldn’t afford to tip would shop blocks away from their homes to save a few pennies; and only those who lived on the upper floors would be willing to part with a nickel to have their stuff carted home and carried up to their door. Still, after two days I had put thirty cents into the Dream Bank towards the tube, even if my sister did complain bitterly that I’d worn her red crayon down to a nub making my sign, so she couldn’t make any red clothes for her paper dolls, just when red was all the rage, and her movie star customers were complaining that—