by Trevanian
For a long time I sat on the end of a tie, completely drained, my arms wrapped around a tacky creosote spar, my legs dangling over the abyss.
It was late when I eased open the door of our apartment and slipped in. My sister was already in bed, and my mother was sitting in the kitchen over a cold cup of coffee. I stood in the kitchen door; she lifted her head and looked at me with battered eyes.
“I found a place out of the rain,” I said.
She reached out and felt my corduroy knickers. “You’re wet to the bone. You’re going to have a fever for sure. You better take a hot bath. I’ll heat up some soup.”
When I undressed, my socks stuck to the congealing gouges on my shin, making me flinch and snort. I said only that I’d fallen down, and without further question Mother gently cleaned the wounds then dabbed them with iodine, which stung and made me suck air through my teeth.
I soaked in the tub with my knees up to keep my shins dry. She sat on the toilet lid and looked down on me sadly. “You’re your father’s son, all right. Nine years old, and you’ve already run away from me twice.”
“Twice?”
“The first time you were just three. You took your brand new red trike with you and left it somewhere. We never found it.”
“Oh...yes. I forgot about that. But I didn’t run away this time.”
Her eyes widened. “What do you mean?”
She needed to believe I hadn’t deserted her, as my father had. “Jeez, you didn’t think I’d run out on you, did you? I wouldn’t do that. Never. Oh, sure, I was mad, but I only wanted to get away and think things out. But then it started to rain, and I had to stay in this bus place until the rain stopped, and by then it was dark, so I...But I always meant to come back.”
“You’d never run out on me? Is that the truth, Jean-Luc? Cross your heart?”
“And hope to die, Mom.”
• • • • • • • • •
During the ’30s and ’40s, most urban Americans went to the movies at least once a week, even though this meant an outlay of from twenty-five to fifty cents for adults (not counting popcorn or candy) and between a dime and fifteen cents for children. With only a few exceptions, my paper route provided the two dimes required for Anne-Marie and me to attend the weekly triple-feature kids’ matinee offered by the Grand Theater on the corner of North Pearl Street and Clinton Avenue where the atmosphere tightened with joyful anticipation as the theater filled with noisy, restive kids laughing, whistling through their fingers, calling across aisles to one another, throwing paper wads, clattering their chair seats. Those rich enough to buy candy made much show of noisily unwrapping bars and opening popcorn boxes, while near-nubile girls found it necessary to go up the aisle from their front-row seats, walking quickly, always in twos, their heads down to show how desperately they hoped they weren’t being noticed, then returning to their seats, where they clutched one another and rolled their eyes and twisted with embarrassment at the thought that you-know-who might have been looking at them...but soon finding another urgent reason to go out to the lobby, even if it did involve running the distressing gauntlet of gawking boys...who in fact never paid the slightest attention to them.
Just as the chaos and confusion reached a frenetic pitch, the theater would darken, and the kids would cheer to the rising notes of a steam-organ version of ‘The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down’ that introduced the first of two or three cartoons. A final scuttling for seats, and the kids’ triple-feature was on. This usually involved a C-grade western by Monogram or Republic, with such stalwarts as Hoot Gibson, Whip Wilson, Lash LaRue, Ken Maynard, or the Three Mesquiteers, a trio of cowboys who rode out of the mesquite-covered prairie to help the weak and foil the bad guys. One of these Mesquiteers was the rangy young John Wayne, who had a clumsy, faintly effeminate walk that he would later convert into the ursine burlesque of feline grace that became a trademark. The western was followed either by a scary film about vampires or werewolves or mummies, or a B detective film featuring The Saint, or Boston Blackie, or Charlie Chan (with his wise-cracking all-American number-one son), then there would be a knock-about comedy, the kids’ favorite being a new comic team that appeared a couple of years before the war: Abbott and Costello. Interspersed among the features were a March of Time, a weekly newsreel and an adventure serial each episode of which ended with the hero locked in a room with a lit stick of dynamite, or being crushed as a mine caved in or clinging by his fingernails to the rim of a cliff above a raging river (whence the term ‘cliff-hanger’), then we’d have a travelogue narrated by some fruity-voiced man and shot in a cheap color stock that was mostly brown and blue, and then at least two comic shorts like Behind the Eightball or the Ritz Brothers or Laurel and Hardy (the most under-rated comics of the sound era, just as the Marx Brothers are the most over-rated).24 After the Saturday Special’s six-hour assault on your senses, you would stagger, blinking, out into the drab, insipid real world (still sinfully sunlit in summer), your eyes blurry, your ears buzzing, your knees stiff, your butt numb, but your soul effervescent with adventure and your spirit strengthened by personal experiences of peril and courage.
My sister and I saw movies of a very different sort on the first and third Thursdays of each month when our mother brought us to Dish Night at the Paramount Theater, a hole-in-the-wall neighborhood movie house that smelled of dust and bug spray. The management tried to bolster receipts on these slow nights by offering dishes at the door and a double feature: a family comedy followed by what my mother called ‘drama films’, in which broad-shouldered heroines wearing thick lipstick drew cigarette smoke far down into their lungs then exhaled it through mouth and nose simultaneously as they slogged their way through an hour and a half of histrionic athletics, standing with their hands on their hips and snapping sassy lines to bland, baffled men. Pencil-thin eyebrows arched, nostrils flaring, lips compressed, eyes flashing, they indulged in towering rages, or wept torrents, or bravely fought back their tears...and sometimes all three within ten minutes. Characterized by high-contrast ‘hatchet’ lighting and expressionistic camera angles, these drama films relied heavily on background music so volcanic that half of the string section risked getting violin elbow in their efforts to support the performances of Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford or the relative newcomer, Susan Hayward, all of whom viewed their craft as an essentially quantitative affair and sought to satisfy their emotionally undernourished fans by loading each gesture, each glance, each word with tons and tons of ‘acting’.25
These high-calorie feasts of passion left a boy of ten feeling that love was a dark and dangerous business.
Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were my mother’s favorite actresses, and she identified with the roles they played: strong women done in by weak and duplicitous men but standing against the world. Photographs of Mother when she was a Charleston champion reveal that she looked something like Joan Crawford, who, towards the end of the silent era, had played Charleston-mad I-don’t-care girls.
With the first blush of puberty, girls who had been happy enough with the raucous chaos of a kids’ matinee suddenly developed, as a kind of secondary sexual trait, a taste for the bathetic involutions of drama films and the emotional gymnastics of the actresses who played in them, while boys of the same age displayed a healthy shallowness of spirit and aesthetic judgment that made them prefer westerns, gangster films, historical adventures (which we called sword-fighting movies) and, after 1942, war films in which actors like John Wayne, having managed to stay out of the real war, shot, bombed and bayoneted two or three thousand Nazi or Nip extras per film.
Although my mother loved her drama films and my sister was fascinated by the costumes, it was the lure of a door prize of free dishes that justified our indulgence. We had enough dishes for our needs, but nothing matched, and it was Mother’s plan to collect a service for four, just in case we had a guest to dinner, though we couldn’t imagine who this might
be. The acquisition of these dishes helped to salve her conscience about spending money on movies once every two weeks. She estimated it would take two and a half years to collect the full set, but it didn’t work out that way because sometimes they gave dishes to kids and other times only to those who had adult tickets, and they never seemed to have the bigger pieces, like dinner plates or serving dishes, so we ended up with three soup bowls and half a dozen salad plates. I found one of those milky green glass soup bowls among Mother’s things when she died more than forty years later and three thousand miles from Pearl Street.
On Dish Thursdays, Anne-Marie and I had to finish our homework early while Mother made a quick supper of potato soup and bean sandwiches, then the three of us would walk up Clinton Avenue to the theater where, in addition to the films, the free dishes, and the usual bouquet of newsreels and short subjects, there would be either Screeno (a projected version of bingo, but we never won the free passes that were the prizes) or an amateur talent show emcee’d by the theater manager, who would dress up in a bright red jacket and crack jokes that we’d all heard on Jack Benny or Bob Hope earlier that week. Mother used to fantasize that one of these days Anne-Marie would dance in that talent show, and she’d bring the house down with applause, and the next thing you know, talent scouts from Paramount studios—it was a Paramount Theater, after all, wasn’t it?—would come knocking at our door, and there she’d be! Our ship! Standing at the dock!
This semi-monthly outing cost us a quarter for Mother’s ticket and ten cents for each of us kids. Forty-five cents was a significant chunk of our budget, so we never bought candy or popcorn, but if the movies had been particularly long and Anne-Marie was sleepy when we got out at nearly midnight, or if it was snowing or raining, we sometimes spent an extra fifteen cents for the three of us to ride the trolley back down the Clinton Avenue hill, and get off just after the trolley’s metal-screeching turn at Pearl Street. A total of sixty cents spent in just one night! Without my paper route, that extravagance would have been unthinkable.
During our long, late-night walks home from the Paramount Theater with Anne-Marie plodding along between Mother and me, half-asleep on her feet, I could usually get Mother to tell stories about her youth in Fort Anne, where her energy and competitive spirit brought her such success at boys’ games and sports that she was known to the tish-tish-ing townswomen as ‘that LaPointe girl’, a reckless hoyden who could out-run, out-climb, out-shout and out-brag any boy in the village. I loved hearing about the outrageous pranks her gang used to play on Halloween: the live snake she once tossed into a passing roadster full of college boys up from Albany, who scrambled out doors and windows before the car came to a full stop in a ditch; how, late one night, one of her ‘gang’ surreptitiously moved an abusive drunk’s privy back a yard, so that its hole was in front of its door; the shovelful of fresh horse manure they put on an old grouch’s front porch, then covered it with newspaper which they lit before knocking on his door and running away, and when he came out, he automatically tried to stamp the fire out only to discover...God damn those kids!
Inquisitive and quick-minded, Mother had led her class in the annual statewide Regent Examinations, and her father talked of her becoming the first of his family to earn that sure passport to success and economic security, a high school diploma. But during the summer of her sixteenth year she suddenly became aware of boys as boys, and outlandish clothes became a vital form of self-expression. She tried lipstick for the first time and learned to strum a banjo/ukulele at evening sing-alongs down on the platform of her father’s train station, where the town’s young people gathered to watch the late train pass on its way from Montreal to New York City, and to sing the popular tunes that adults despised for both their listless ‘crooning’ and their dangerous messages of saucy independence. To her surprise and pleasure, she discovered that the fashion ideal had shifted from the ample, pigeon-breasted Gibson Girl to her own trim tomboy figure which, together with her zest for life, constituted ideal attributes for a girl of the Charleston era. She exchanged her role as a competitor and a buddy of the town’s boys for the unsure but exciting role of a desirable hellion with stockings rolled down to below the knee. Her desire to dive into the foaming currents of life caused her to quit school, leave her home town and take a job in a textile factory in Hudson Falls, where she spent most of her wages on the flimsy fashions she could wear to such advantage as she ran with a fun-hungry gang in roadsters with rumble seats, and entered dance marathons to the challenge-and-response patterns of ragtime, or danced romantic ‘slows’ to the suggestive croon of Russ Colombo or the nasal mewl of Rudy Vallee, both of whom would be eclipsed in her affections when sound came to the movies and millions of American women fell under the spell of Maurice Chevalier’s irresistibly pendulous lower lip. This was Mother’s golden age, her heyday. She got into a shouting match with a suggestive foreman at the cotton mill (that French-’n’-Indian temper of hers), so she quit to become a waitress in a roadhouse frequented by hooch-runners bringing whiskey down from Canada. She also met laughing, carefree college boys who were working through their summer vacations and spending most of their nights singing, strumming their banjos and ukuleles, and drinking hooch from pocket flasks. Life was bright and gay and good, and she was at the very center of it.
Then, at the age of twenty, she met and instantly fell in love with my father, who came from that sophisticated metropolis, Philadelphia, and who had an alluring whiff of the bad and the dangerous about him because he worked with rum-runners, played cards with criminals, and possessed the con man’s facile charm. He had the thick, slicked-down hair and the arch profile of a model for Troy shirt collars, and he fulfilled those twin lofty ideals of the ’Twenties Woman: he was a good dresser and a great dancer. Most wonderful of all, this exciting paragon preferred her to all the other girls. He thought she was special!
They married, but after two days of honeymoon, he met some men who had a good thing going in Florida seaside property and could use a slick talker as a front man, so he left, explaining that he’d only be away for a week at most. A week passed, then two, then a month. And suddenly he dropped out of sight, and she had to return to her people and seek work locally.
But she couldn’t believe she’d been abandoned. There must be some mistake. She made up stories about what might have happened to prevent his return. Several months passed and she was noticeably pregnant before she could accept that she had been deserted. She plunged into bitterness, hurt and disappointment. Didn’t anyone love and want her? Not even her father, who had sent her away to live with her aunts after her mother died? It must be her fault in some way. What was wrong with her? It was in this state of self-doubt and self-loathing that she gave birth to me, and she attached all her love and hopes for the future to a baby boy who would never abandon her and always love her. As a little girl, my mother had dreamed of becoming a success in life because ‘that would show them all’. And if she couldn’t do it herself because some irresponsible man had abandoned her, then her boy would go out into the world, capture success and recognition, and bring it home for them to share. Together, they’d show them!
Mother’s stories about the things she had gotten up to as a wild hoyden in Fort Anne would be punctuated every fifteen minutes by the passage of a rattling, clanging, glittering block of glass and light, the Clinton Avenue trolley car with its motorman in front working his foot bell and accelerator lever, and the conductor in back, responsible for collecting fares and keeping the contact wheel on the wire, both wearing black uniforms and visored caps with wicker sides to ventilate their heads. At that late hour, there was only a handful of half-asleep passengers. A moment of brilliance and noise, and the ground-shaking trolley had passed and was going down the dark street towards its union with Pearl Street at the bottom of the hill, taking its light and animation with it. If Anne-Marie was particularly sleepy, we would consider taking the next trolley, but we usually rejected the idea as a sham
eful waste of money because a ride down the entire Clinton Avenue hill only cost a nickel, so it seemed prodigal to spend a nickel to go only halfway down. We would continue on, Anne-Marie’s feet numbly slapping on the pavement as she walked between us, eyes closed, half-asleep, relying on us to guide her.