The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

by Trevanian

  Mother’s favorite story was the one of how she trained all through the fall and winter of her fourteenth year to compete in the annual long-distance race down the frozen Champlain Canal to Fort Edward. This skating competition was held at night, when the temperature was lowest and the ice most stable. With the crack of the starter’s gun, she broke into the lead, then, bent low over her skates, her hands clasped behind her back, she sped over the black ice between banks of ghost-gray snow, chasing a ripple of reflected moonlight down the ice, as the uneven surface beneath her skates made her feet thrum, and the wind stung tears from her eyes. The long, rhythmic click-hiss, click-hiss of the Patented Tubular Racer Skates her father bought her especially for the contest; the shouts and laughter of her competitors fading behind her as she began to outdistance them; the bonfires farm children built along the way to greet the racers with cups of hot chocolate, but Mother passed by and skated on, intent on victory, until she crossed the line scratched on the ice at Fort Edward a full fifteen minutes before her closest competitor. She described that race through the frigid moonlit night with such intensity that the details of her triumph are frozen into my memory, as though I had been there, as though it had been mine; this victory made her famous for a whole winter. Her feat was even mentioned in the Glens Falls paper. She was someone, a success!

  The story of her great race and the one about my grandfather forcing those stuffy ladies to sip afternoon tea with his young wife were the ones I most often asked my mother to re-tell as we walked back home after Dish Night at the Paramount.

  It began to snow as we were returning from the movies late one winter night, large lazily tumbling flakes that Anne-Marie and I tried to catch on our tongues. The last Clinton Avenue trolley clanged and rattled past us, snow swirling around it like the white particles in a ‘snowstorm’ paperweight. When we got home, Pearl Street was deserted and strangely silent in the muffling snowfall. We climbed our stoop, and I looked back down the street and saw our tracks on the new-fallen snow, three sets of footprints stretching down the sidewalk to a pool of streetlight and disappearing into the darkness beyond, and already the snow was filling our footsteps in. I felt sure there was something portentous in this vision, something symbolic and oceanic. A woman and two children had passed through the storm and the darkness. Seeking what? Fleeing what?26

  • • • • • • • • •

  Nothing so stimulated my imagination as a raging storm late at night...sudden lightning and sky-shredding claps of thunder so close together that I gasped again in mid-gasp. I felt safe with my Hudson Bay blanket around my shoulders as I watched Nature rage out in the street, although there was always a tinge of guilt at being snug and dry while down-and-outers pressed into doorways with newspapers stuffed under their shirts for warmth. Silver streaks of rain hatched through the cone of light from our streetlamp, and plump raindrops exploded on the cobblestones until swirling, frothing water gurgled up through the gutter grill, sheeted across the sidewalk and ran down basement steps to flood coal bunkers and leave them dank and smelly.

  Autumn windstorms sharpened my senses but dazzled them at the same time, as if electricity and friction caused me to read fast and think in a hectic, scattered rush. Lots of thinking, little thought. And when the night wind moaned around the corners of buildings, wuthered in basement wells, fluted through chimney pots, and sucked at the loose panes of my window, rattling them in their crumbling putty, I would turn newfound words in my mind, particularly windy-sounding words like ‘vicarious’ and ‘ethereal’, or I would grapple with big ideas like Free Will and Sin...especially sin. Has any word ever been so yeasty as ‘sin’? I would weave sounds and unravel meanings while the rain danced on the cobbles and the wind sucked at my window.

  Baffling thoughts on blustery, wind-dazed nights.

  • • • • • • • • •

  I was staring out into the street one night, empty-minded, coasting, when my attention was snagged by a drunk having trouble negotiating the cracks in the pavement. While looking back over his shoulder swearing at the crack that had tripped him up, he stepped off the high curb on our side of the street and lurched across to the streetlamp, which he embraced just in time to save himself from falling on his face. It was Old Joe Meehan, tyrant of the Meehan tribe.

  Sometimes at night there would be a sudden shout or a scream from within the Meehan warren, and ten or twelve of them would come pouring down their stoops into the street, arguing, snarling, fighting: human magma ejected by the heat of some internecine friction, probably over those breeding rights and sexual tangles that were the constant subject of the block’s indignant but riveting gossip. I sometimes found my imagination wandering to what sorts of things those Meehans got up to. I knew it was shameful and sinful and ugly and foul and all that...but it was also intriguing for a ten-year-old boy. Not that I wanted to do anything. No, no, I just...well...wondered.

  Sometimes the Meehan warren contained as few as twenty people, sometimes twice that many. Births, runaways, imprisonments, desertions, hospitalizations, deaths, benders, and simply getting lost for a few weeks kept the population variable, so no one knew exactly how many Meehans there were at any given time, but the number slowly and continually grew because, whatever their other moral defects might be, the Meehans were good Catholics who scrupulously abjured birth control.

  From the mailman the block learned that the Meehans received six weekly welfare checks, one for each ‘family’. In addition, they got five dollars per adult from the ward heeler whenever there was an election of any kind, a gift from the O’Conner Gang to make sure that the Democratic Party continued to enjoy the full support of the Meehans. There was always a riotous party over at the Meehans’ on election nights, one that inevitably ended with random couplings and a great tangled fistfight in which some Meehans would gang up on others and try to throw them out onto the street. Finally the police would arrive and there would be a fight between the police and the suddenly re-united Meehans, nightsticks on the one side, iron rods, chains, and gravel-filled socks on the other. Some Meehans always ended up in the slammer after election night, and others ended up pregnant.

  I have to confess that my mother also sold her vote at each election for five dollars from our perspiring, derby-hatted ward heeler, but she refused to feel guilty about it because we needed every cent we could get our hands on. And anyway, she was devoted to Roosevelt, who she felt understood her problems on a personal level and would never let her down, a feeling shared by most of the poor, so she would have voted the Democratic ticket anyway. She justified her vote-selling by claiming to have gypped the ward heeler out of his five dollars—and let that be a lesson to the vote-buying bastard!

  I was passing the mouth of our alley on my way home from the library late one evening, and I was startled by a voice. “Hey, you! Professor! Come here!” It was Patrick Meehan. Oh-oh.

  Patrick Meehan and I had never exchanged a word, and that was just fine with me. Patrick was seventeen, and he was big and tough and stupid. He had earned his reputation as the meanest kid on the block by beating up any boy or man who fooled with his simple-minded sister, Brigid. And not just beating them up, but pounding them until they had to go to the emergency room of the hospital. Patrick could only see out of one eye; the other was sunken and had a milky membrane over it ever since it had been poked with a stick during a fight with two kids who had used Brigid. The two kids ended up in the hospital, and Patrick went back into reform school for six months.

  So you can see why his shout of, “Hey, you! Professor! Come here!” brought me to a standstill at the mouth of the alley. I considered hotfooting it to the safety of my apartment, but I would have to go back out onto the street sooner or later, so the best thing to do was to face the music.

  “Come here!”

  I walked up the alley, my knees watery. “Hey, what’s up, Patrick? How’s it going?”

  “Lookit, professor
, your...mother...she’s...” he started. But he had difficulty dragging words out of the thick tangle of his thoughts.

  “What about her?” My voice was stronger. I wasn’t going to take any crap about my mother, even from Patrick. But it seemed unfair to get beaten up by him when I’d never had anything to do with Brigid. Well...all right...maybe I had sat up a few nights, looking across at the Meehan warren, wondering what sort of...things...might be going on over there, but you wouldn’t beat a kid up for that. ...Would you?

  “She’s nice.”

  “What?”

  “Your mother, she’s nice. She’s nice to my mother. Always says hello and stuff. So she’s all right by me, your mother.”

  “Ah...good.”

  “I just wanted to tell ya.”

  “Well...fine. I’m glad you told me. I...ah...well, I guess I better get along.”

  “Yeah, you go ahead. But tell your mother she’s okay by me.”

  “I’ll do that. See you around, Patrick.”

  “See ya ’round, professor.”

  When I got home I passed on Patrick Meehan’s compliments to Mother, and she seemed pleased.

  “He sounds like a nice boy.”

  I stared at her, unbelieving. “No, Mother, Patrick Meehan is not a nice boy.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “No, he has this little problem. He hurts people, and one of these days he’s going to kill someone.”

  “Oh, I doubt that.”

  I just shook my head. How could anyone living on North Pearl Street be so far out of contact with the brutal facts of life?

  • • • • • • • • •

  After fighting through the winter, ‘courageous little Finland’, as radio commentators always called her, finally surrendered to the Russians in March of 1940, that ominous-sounding year whose arrival I had dreaded. In April Germany occupied Denmark and swept up through the Norwegian ports. News broadcasts reported that German submarines were sinking many of the British ships carrying American goods to England. Then on May 10, after the months of inexplicable inactivity of the ‘Phony War’, the German army launched a lightning assault through the Netherlands into France, outflanking the totally useless Maginot Line.27

  By the end of June 1940, most of France was occupied, and the southern part had become a neutral, collaborating state with Marshal Ptain at its head and Vichy as its capital.28 A cross-channel invasion of England seemed imminent, but throughout July History held her breath as Germany digested the huge territories it had gobbled up, and England, the only enemy left, struggled to make up for decades of unpreparedness and years of appeasement. It was not until August that the Luftwaffe began massive bombing raids in an attempt to soften Britain up for invasion.

  In America, the 1940 harvest of popular songs was so rich and varied that few of them remained long on the Hit Parade before they were crowded off by newcomers swarming in behind them.29 Some of these songs came from the Big Bands, others from Broadway musicals or films, which also resurrected a few oldies. They were the songs you could hear at night, playing quietly from radios within apartments...quietly, not out of consideration for neighbors, but because our Irish believed that it cost more electricity to play a radio loudly. The summer sky above our jagged roofscape didn’t darken until after eight o’clock, and streetlife on North Pearl extended late into the night; kids bawled and brawled as adults sprawled around the stoops listening to music from radios put out on window ledges, the women in faded cotton housedresses lifting their chins to let the evening breeze cool their moist necks; men in sticky undershirts sucked at quart bottles of ale, only rarely deigning to enter the women’s conversation, and then only to tell their wives that if they didn’t know what the hell they were talking about they should shut up, then going on to abuse the goddamned New Deal, the goddamned welfare system, or today’s goddamned kids, the first for trying to force men into slave labor with the WPA, the second for being run by a tightfisted bunch of fancy-talking stuck-up college guys who, when it came right down to it, didn’t know shit from Shinola, and the third for not showing proper respect for their elders. And it’s all that Eleanor Roosevelt’s fault! A woman shouldn’t stick her nose in where it wasn’t wanted!

  Hot and airless though it was in our apartment by the end of a sweltering day, my mother wouldn’t sit out on our stoop for a breath of evening air because she didn’t want to have anything to do with ‘these people’ who had been slum-dwellers for generations, unlike us, who were only on Pearl Street because the Depression had ambushed us. She maintained that it was dangerous to consort with people who didn’t come up to your standards of cleanliness, honesty, and self-respect because ‘You can’t tell a flock of birds by its feathers’. (Another of my mother’s addled adages: in this case, perhaps the result of a high-velocity collision between ‘you can’t tell a book by its cover’ and ‘birds of a feather flock together’.) Instead, after our evening programs were over, she would click the radio off and say, “Let’s get out of this dump!” and she’d take Anne-Marie and me for a walk downtown, where flashing signs in rippling patterns of small lightbulbs or in the newer bent neon tubes (how do they bend light like that?) spilled colors over the faces of the crowd, and we could smell the rich baritone aroma of chocolate from the open door of the Fanny Farmer shop as we passed on our way from store to store, window-shopping and fantasizing about all the fine things we’d own and all the interesting things we’d do when we got out of Albany. Sometimes we’d meet the Peanut Man on the street in front of the Planters Peanut Shop, a sandwich-board man wearing a huge peanut with a top hat and monocle and thin black-clad legs sticking out the bottom. He offered passers-by free spoonfuls of freshly roasted salted peanuts. The three of us would queue up for our samples, and sometimes Anne-Marie, who had reached an age at which she was fully aware of the charm of her long blonde hair and large innocent blue eyes, would go back for a second spoonful, although we knew you were supposed to take only one. I envied her brass, but I never dared to try for seconds for myself. A refusal would have been so humiliating that I would have done or said something rash and yet more humiliating.

  By the time we had threaded our way home through quiet side streets it would be after ten o’clock, and Mother and Anne-Marie would go to bed, but I would sit in the dark, watching the street, my window open the couple of inches its warped frame would allow to catch the breeze. On a typical summer night, a knot of teenaged boys would have gathered next to the cornerstore on the strip of hard-packed waste ground that Mr Kane sardonically called ‘his garden’.

  Girls who had just that summer disdained hopscotch and jump-rope as kids’ stuff would detach themselves from the giggling gaggle that by ancient tradition collected two stoops down from the cornerstore, and they would stroll up past the boys on the corner, always in protective twos. Pretending to be lost in earnest conversation, a pair of girls (usually a prettier, more confident, more developed one and her shyer, plainer, fatter friend who got vicarious thrills from her desirable friend’s love life) would run the gauntlet of ogling, wisecracking boys, the shy one gripping her friend’s hand as they hurried by. Once they reached the corner, there was nothing to do but undergo the indignity of being looked at, evaluated and commented on again as they returned to the knot of girls clustered around the stoop. The brassy one would sometimes engage the boys in racy single-entendre badinage, then upon returning, she would recount her encounter to breathlessly admiring friends.

  “...so he goes: How about it? So I go: How about what? And he goes: You know what. So I put on my ritzy voice and I go: I beg your pardon I’m sure, but I certainly do not know to what you are referring to. Why don’t you inform me of it, if you’re so smart. (Oh, hon, you didn’t!) I did so. And I turn my nose up and start to walk away, but he grabs me by the arm, so I go: Don’t handle the merchandise until it’s paid for. (Oh, hon, you didn’t!) Well that stops him cold, so he goes: How much?
And I come right back: More than you’ll ever have! (You didn’t!) I did so. And he goes: Come on, give a guy a break. So I go: I’ll have my cousin break your arm, that’s the only break I’ll give you. So his pals laugh at him, and I walk away. (Oh, hon! You didn’t!)

  Listening to the explicit lyrics of this primitive mating chant through my open window, I was repelled by the banality and stupidity of it all, for I was a crisp-minded eleven-year-old while these salivating canines nosing one another’s crotches were teenagers...worlds, entire cultures, infinities beneath me. There was one thing I was absolutely sure of: when I was a year or two older, nothing in the world would make me behave in that undignified way, sniffing around girls like a dog. I was, of course, wrong.30

  I was not spared the baffling onset of testosterone madness, for within six months of the night I sat at the window, eavesdropping on that girl’s neo-nubile prattle and feeling superior to her crude mating rituals, I fell victim to the nameless urges and surges of desire. I was eleven years old when I first fell in love, a hesitant, secret love untainted by desire. Well, no desire that I recognized as such. Well...not at first, anyway. She was, after all, a nun.

  Love on Pearl Street

  (or: Brigid Meehan’s Left Breast)

  ALTHOUGH I was only eleven when I first fell in love, I was not totally unequipped to grapple with the mysteries of that glorious affliction of heart and groin. Not only did I know where babies came from and how they got there, I even had inklings of the nature of romantic love.

  First, the babies and the ballistics. I already knew the fundamental mechanics of copulation because my remarkably modern mother believed it was healthiest to respond as honestly as she could to questions posed by me or my sister. I listened soberly, and with growing incredulity, to her frank description of human love-making. I couldn’t believe it. Why would two sane people want to do that...especially people who claimed to like each other? Responding to my doubts and my basic squeamishness, my mother went to some lengths to assure me that love-making was a pleasurable thing, indeed the most sublime act that two people in love could share. I remained dubious. Why should I believe love-making was all that sublime and beautiful when Nature herself held so dim a view of the act that She obliged us to perform it with our pissing gear? If body space was so tight that Nature had to double up on functions, why didn’t She have us smell with our fingertips or hear with our elbows—anything to save some special part of the body for the performance of this sublime act? (Perhaps the belly button, which seemed to have no very urgent function assigned to it.) Something wasn’t right here. Either my mother was wrong about the loftiness of love-making, or Nature was playing a cruel joke.