by Trevanian
It would be misleading to give the impression that I found the responsibility for getting my mother and sister out of North Pearl Street so burdensome that I sat up every night planning to run away and free myself. In fact, the hours I spent looking out onto the street were, for the most part, pleasant and restful. I would sit on the edge of my bed or kneel by the window, drifting through daydreams, making up narratives, or slowly turning some concept in the fingers of my mind until drowsiness overwhelmed me. Only occasionally, when the pressures became too great, would I slip into the balm and refuge of what I called The Other Place...a mystic internal locale to which I enjoyed privileged access.41 But when money was particularly tight, or Mother was ill for a long time, or deep in the blues that crushed the joy out of her, tension would sneak up on me as I sat at the window, until I realized that my jaw muscles were sore from standing out like ropes as I ground my teeth with the dread that I would never be able to accomplish the task of bringing our damned ship in. I simply didn’t know what to do! It was at these times that I found comfort in planning to run away from home. Not often. Maybe twice a year or so. But I never did carry out the escape game that served as an emotional release valve, and after Ben arrived I no longer felt the need to run away because I had found someone on whom I could off-load responsibility for my mother’s happiness.
Over the months that followed I learned more about Ben, some of it troubling. I learned why he didn’t drink...or, rather, that he did drink, but only rarely and with considerable risk. Mother talked him into taking his acid-green suit down to the barrel-shop and trading it in on a looser-fitting mud-colored three-piece suit. To initiate it they both dressed up and went out for a beer at the Corner Tavern down on Quackenbush Street, where I used to drop in with my shoe-shine box on Friday nights. They got back pretty early, and Ben didn’t seem drunk or even especially exhilarated, but the next day he got into a bitter argument with the foreman in the brewery and the upshot was that he got fired. It wasn’t long before he found another job, digging sewer lines in the nearby town of Watervliet, but it paid less and it was cold, wet work. Mother made sandwiches for his lunch pail and a thermos of hot soup, but he missed coming home to her every noon so they could have an hour together without us kids around. Ben confessed to Mother (and she thought it was necessary to take me aside and tell me ‘on the QT’) that drinking that beer at the Corner Tavern had been a big mistake. He swore to her that he drank very seldom, so he certainly wasn’t an alcoholic or anything like that, but this wasn’t the first time that he had taken a few drinks, and then had done something stupid that cost him his job, or his money, or a friend. He couldn’t understand it. Above all, he couldn’t understand why he took a drink in the first place, considering the disastrous effect it almost always had on him. It wasn’t that he got drunk—not unsteady or morose or maudlin or aggressive; he didn’t drink enough for that. The effect drinking had on Ben was to make him do something stupid or self-harming, a loss of judgment that usually didn’t occur until the day after he had drunk a couple of beers. He had promised himself a hundred times that he would never touch a glass of beer again, but he always did. He claimed that he sort of forgot the consequences. Forgot! Now that’s nuts. He wondered if maybe his father, whom he had never known, had been an alcoholic or a nutcase or something like that.
He told Mother that he had first noticed this weakness when, at the age of sixteen, he had lied about his age and enlisted in the Navy. After surviving those boot-camp routines and fatigues that are designed to crush the last traces of individualism, he took his first liberty from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station with some other boots. During his twelve hours of freedom in Milwaukee he drank a couple of shots of whisky...just showing off, playing it for grown up. The next day, although he had nothing against the Navy, he climbed over a fence and kept going until he was in Seattle. From that time on, Ben had drifted from one low-paid, casual job to another, never daring to seek regular employment because he feared that the Navy was looking for him and if they found him, they would put him into prison for desertion. This accounted for all the crappy jobs taken over the years by a man who possessed a powerful work ethic and the gifts of intelligence and initiative that should have brought him better-paid work. It also accounted for his drifting from place to place across the country, keeping on the move because he feared that ‘they’ were looking for him.
Even in that winter of 1940–41, when unemployment was beginning to loosen its stranglehold as industry expanded to serve America’s Lend-Lease Program for equipping England to fight the Germans, Ben never sought the higher-paying work his native abilities merited, because such work would oblige him to reveal his Social Security number, through which the Navy could find him. He limited himself to doing mindless stoop-labor at places that paid him cash-in-hand at the end of each week and no questions asked.
I resented Mother’s taking me into her confidence about Ben’s peculiar problems with alcohol, because there was nothing I could do about it other than worry. But I still enjoyed his company, his rich cache of stories, and his wry, earthy view of human nature. Because he was quick-minded enough to have picked up the essentials of half a dozen building trades by working as a casual helper, he viewed all claims of privilege based upon ‘experience’ to be smoke screens thrown up by those who feared competition. He said that most men who brag of having ten years’ experience on the job have really only had a week’s experience repeated 520 times. He believed that any bright person can do anything these ‘craftsmen’ can do; the only ‘experience’ he needs is learning the language of the trade and having access to the specialized tools; all the rest is down to brains, motivation and the ability to generalize from particulars. When a lamp needed repair Ben would let me help him. He began by explaining the general principles of electrical flow, personifying an electron as ‘this negatively charged yahoo who comes high-tailin’ it down a wire so fast that his friction heats up the filaments and makes them glow.’ Having sketched in the principles involved, he would do the specific job in hand, repairing a short in a wire, for instance, explaining everything as he did it, step by step, then he would undo his work and let me do it, patiently accepting the fact that my clumsiness and inexperience would cause any job to take three times as long with my help as it would have taken without it. Finally, he would generalize what we had done and show how the same theory and the same methods would apply to other problems with electrical things that didn’t work.42
I liked the rubbery flexibility of Ben’s battered face. His roughhouse life had left him with a broken nose and puffy brows, but he had remained an optimist at core, and he knew hundreds of folksy similes, some of which were pretty blue and drew my mother’s prudish disapproval, like ‘being as frustrated as a one-armed paper-hanger’, or working as hard ‘as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest’ or saying that something unpopular ‘went over like a fart in a diving bell’. I also appreciated his well-developed sense of the absurd. He and I would sometimes join forces in chasing some idea to its reductio ad absurdum, usually to my mother’s frowning annoyance because she found the absurd baffling and irritating (perhaps irritating because baffling). I recall one evening when Ben was telling stories about hobos he had met while riding the rails. He described one of them as being ugly...so-o ugly that all his ugliness wouldn’t fit on his face, so he had to carry some of it around with him in a paper bag. I instantly jumped into the stream of his absurdity, suggesting that some day this hobo might meet a woman who was beautiful...so-o beautiful that all her beauty wouldn’t fit on her face so she had to carry some of it around in a paper bag. And if, for some reason, this ugly hobo decided to pour the excess ugliness out of his bag into hers—
Ben immediately caught on and continued, “...there would be a loud snap, crackle and pop, and when they looked into her bag...it would be empty!”
“Exactly!” I said, slapping the table with delight.
Mother blinked. “I don
’t get it. Why was the bag empty?”
“Because,” I explained, “his ugliness had canceled out her beauty, leaving nothing behind!”
“Maybe there was a gray powder of ordinary looks left behind,” Ben suggested.
“No,” I said. “If his ugliness had blended with her beauty, they might have produced ordinary looks; but they didn’t blend, they neutralized one another!”
“You’re right, partner. There wouldn’t have been anything left in the bag. In fact, the vacuum created by the sudden neutralization would have sucked that bag together so tight that it wouldn’t have been a bag any longer, just a double-thickness piece of paper.”
Mother sniffed and said she just didn’t see the point of all this nonsense, and Ben winked at me and told her with great seriousness that she was absolutely right, there was no sense to it. Then he admonished me for wasting time on ridiculous ideas that didn’t have any sense to them, and I said I was sorry and I would never, ever do it again, and Ben said, “And make sure you don’t!”
Although Ben didn’t possess any of the social and physical graces that my mother had found so attractive in my father (on the few occasions that I saw Ben run, his arms and legs had the every-which-a-way chaos of a startled herd), and although his habits of speech were too scatological and salty for her, she appreciated his essential kindness and his native sense of fair play. But she was not proud to be seen in his company. In short, except for his bizarre and troubling reaction to alcohol, Ben possessed all those solid qualities that parents look for in a husband for their daughter, but few of those decorative ones the daughter seeks on her own behalf.
The five dollars a week that he paid Mother for his meals was enough for her to put a little into the Dream Bank, and that made her feel more secure than she had for years. By Easter, Ben had become a member of our family even to the extent of joining in the ritual of sitting in the dark to listen to the Friday night mystery programs on our Emerson. Anne-Marie was comfortable with him, and she was more sensitive than I about Mother’s ambiguous feelings towards him. One Saturday when we were walking home from a movie we had been sent to so the adults could be alone together, she confided to me that she thought Ben liked Mother more than Mother liked Ben, and she hoped Mother didn’t ‘break Ben’s heart’. I wrinkled my nose at the soap-opera phrasing, but I knew what she meant.
• • • • • • • • •
Summer vacation was half over when my mother received a letter from her cousin, Lorna, who lived in a small quarrying town on the Vermont border. Lorna and Mother had been very close when they were teenagers, closer than Mother had been to either of her sisters, with whom she had felt she had to compete for her father’s love. The two cousins won all the cups on offer for dancing the Charleston together, but the ‘Deadly Dancing Duo’, as they styled themselves, broke up when Lorna met Tonio, a lazy, handsome bully who had a newspaper/magazine/candy shop that was also a numbers outlet. Right from the first, my mother and Tonio didn’t hit it off, and when he made a play for her while dating her cousin, she told Lorna that she was too good for him, and she ought to drop him like a hot tomato. When Lorna got pregnant, Mother offered to help pay for an abortion, because anything would be better than living her life with a man like that. There was no abortion and Lorna and Tonio got married, but she miscarried a month after the wedding, and something must have gone wrong because she never got pregnant again. Tonio never quite lost the suspicion that he had been somehow tricked into this marriage.
Tonio saw to it that the two cousins didn’t see much of each other over the years that followed, but when Mother married my father, the whole family got together for the wedding, where my grandfather didn’t bother to hide his low estimation of the strutting Tonio, who wore black silk ties and fedoras with wide snap brims in imitation of George Raft, whom he resembled. When Tonio bragged about his contacts among the ‘smart boys’ from Glens Falls and Troy, there were words between him and my grandfather that ended with Tonio dragging Lorna away from the reception, and Mother always felt that her favorite cousin’s failure to stay at the reception had jinxed her marriage.
After my father deserted us for the second time, we had been obliged to live with Lorna and Tonio for a couple of months while Mother looked for a job. But the presence of Anne-Marie and me in their childless home caused friction. ‘Uncle’ Tonio (Mother had us call them aunt and uncle out of affection for Lorna) took a particular dislike to me. He looked on my bookishness as a personal affront because he had flunked out of school. But he’d shown them all by buying his newspaper/magazine/candy shop with a loan from ‘the boys down in Troy’, the boys he ran numbers for. Uncle Tonio found my habit of muttering to myself in the course of my story games particularly irritating. “You wanna know what that kid is? I’ll tell you what he is. He’s crazy, that’s what he is. A crazy kid with big words running out his mouth, that’s all he is.” One day I responded sassily to something he said, and he cuffed me on the back of the head. Mother’s F-’n’-I temper flashed, and there was a shouting match, with Mother calling Tonio a cheap numbers flunky and Tonio responding that it was no wonder her husband had dumped her, with her constant carping and bitching. My mother said at least my father hadn’t knocked up some romantic kid to make her marry him, and the next thing you know, the two cousins were going a few rounds, picking at the scab of an old sore concerning the Charleston cups they had won when they were dancing together. They both wanted to know where those cups were now. You tell me! I don’t have them! Well, I certainly don’t have them! Well, somebody’s got them! Well, not me! And it all ended up in shouts and tears and slamming doors.
An hour later, I found Anne-Marie sitting on the cellar stairs, rocking herself, her eyes fixed on the darkness below. Although she was not yet two, strife and tension upset her deeply, obliging her to withdraw into herself in search of a peaceful place to be. I sat beside her until she became aware of my presence and stopped rocking herself. For a time, she just sat there, breathing in and out evenly, then she rose and went out into the backyard. I knew from experience that she would have to be alone for a while before she was able to be with people again.
The following morning, Mother, Anne-Marie and I were on a bus for Lake George Village, where she managed to find a job before the money in her purse ran out.
About a year later, when my father wrote to her out of the blue asking us to join him in Albany so we could pick up the threads of our life together, Mother had to swallow her pride and contact Lorna to ask if Tonio could help us move our few possessions to Albany. Grudgingly, yet triumphantly, he drove over to Lake George Village in his old truck, loaded it up with our stuff, crammed the three of us into the front seat beside him, and brought us to North Pearl Street, all without saying more than half a dozen words, and most of these grumbled under his breath. Mother never forgave him for just dumping us on the sidewalk and driving away, and the two cousins had not communicated since. Mother had been hurt by her long separation from Lorna—not that she ever thought their falling out was her fault in any way! No, sir! And she’d be goddamned if she’d be the first to apologize, believe me you!
Aunt Lorna’s unexpected letter invited me to come to Granville that summer and spend the month of July with them. Mother read this as a gesture of reconciliation, an oblique request for forgiveness on Lorna’s part, if not on Tonio’s, and she was willing to meet her part way. She asked me what I thought about the idea of spending July in Granville.
“Well...I don’t know...”
“It might do you good to get out of the city for a while. I’ll do the paper route for you.”
“Yes, but...”
“And you won’t be bored. Lorna says that Tonio says there’s plenty for a boy to do around there.”
“Yeah...well...”
And it was settled. I was going to have a nice vacation, like it or lunk it.
• • • • • • • • •
In April Hitler came to the assistance of the Italians who had been beaten to a standstill by Greek partisans. Germany invaded Greece and Yugoslavia, both of which were overrun by the end of the month. On the radio, solemn-voiced commentators explained that Hitler had dared to attack Yugoslavia because the Russo-German Nonaggression Pact assured him that the Soviets would not intervene on the side of their fellow Slavs. Now the Axis dominated all of Europe except for six countries: Switzerland and Sweden, which enjoyed a profitable neutrality, Spain and Portugal, which were ruled by fascist dictators whose neutrality was distinctly pro-German, and Ireland, whose neutrality was distinctly anti-English.
England stood alone.
That June, Hitler renounced his Nonaggression Pact with the Russians and launched a surprise invasion, his armored units penetrating deep into Soviet territory as all opposition seemed to melt before the invincible German tanks.
When I asked Mr Kane about this out on his side steps, I was surprised that he seemed less gloomy than he had been of late, despite the news broadcasts telling us day after day how much farther the Germans had thrust into Russia. “He’s made a mistake,” Mr Kane said, looking down at the hard-packed sooty earth of his ‘garden’ with narrowed eyes, as though he were peering into the future. “Hitler has made Napoleon’s mistake. He’ll be conquered by the vast distances, and by the weather. The versts and snow. Russia’s ancient weapons. Like Napoleon, Hitler will be beaten by General Winter.”