The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

by Trevanian

  Nothing brought the reality of the distant European war to us so personally as the popular songs we followed on the weekly Your Lucky Strike Hit Parade. As early as 1939, many people had been touched by the resilience and courage evinced in ‘We’ll Meet Again’, a song that we knew, not in its original stiff-upper-lip British version by Vera Lynn, but in the smooth, easy-listening version made popular by the Ink Spots.43 As the war came closer, three popular songs in particular revealed the state of things in Europe: ‘White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘My Sister and I’, and ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’.

  • • • • • • • • •

  July came, and I had the adventure of traveling alone on the bus to Granville, changing buses at Glens Falls. But by the time I had passed three days in Aunt Lorna and Uncle Tonio’s house, my most ardent desire was to be back on North Pearl Street. I felt out of place in the silent, childless house that Aunt Lorna kept immaculately tidy: a nervous cleanliness that seemed unnatural to me. It turned out that Uncle Tonio’s ‘plenty for a boy to do’ began with mowing his lawn. Then he suggested that I go around the town asking people if they wanted their lawns mowed. ‘Make a little money for yourself. It’s better than taking hand-outs from the welfare.’

  In Granville, as elsewhere in America, mowing the lawn and shoveling the snow were the man’s major contribution to household chores, and he did both with more fuss and gadgetry than was necessary, so my only potential customers were old women living on their own. But Granville had lots of old women on their own because it was a quarry town, and slate quarrying is dangerous work that tends to skew populations towards a preponderance of widows. I walked around town knocking on doors and offering to do their lawns using their own lawn mowers, all of which turned out to be heavy antiques that hadn’t been oiled in years and had never felt the harsh caress of a sharpener’s stone. The going rate for a lawn was fifteen cents, and to save money the old women let their grass go until it was at least three inches high, so mowing it was really hard work. By the time I had slogged my way through the first lawn, I had a row of puffy blisters on each palm and the web of each thumb was raw and weeping. I was able to take only short bites in the long grass before it jammed the reel and obliged me to back off to get a run at the next short bite, throwing all my weight against the wooden handle of the mower with each short surge. My first lawn took all morning, then when I knocked on the door to collect my fifteen cents, the lady called my attention to my failure to trim around the edges and borders, and to rake up the grass and pile it neatly in back, and did I really intend to put that lawn mower away without cleaning it first? Would I treat my own mower that way? Mowers cost money, you know, and money doesn’t grow on trees.

  It took from after breakfast until lunch to do a lawn, then most of the afternoon to do a second one, if I was lucky enough to find another customer. The backs of my calves and the nape of my neck got so sunburned that I could only sleep on my stomach; and the blisters I got that first day burst again with every job and never got a proper chance to callous over.

  Most of the old ladies I mowed for were so demanding and tight-fisted that I was surprised when one customer, a gaunt woman with the gimlet eye and the razor-thin lips of a storybook witch, gave me a glass of Kool-Aid and a nickel tip in addition to my fifteen cents. My very next client was a sweet old dear with a vague smile and pale blue eyes. When I finished her lawn she dumped fifteen pennies into my palm and, with a twinkle in her faded eyes, she asked, “Would you like a dime?” Assuming she was offering a tip, I said, thanks, that’s very nice of you, so she took back the pennies and gave me a dime, all the while smiling and winking at me in an impish way that made it impossible for me to complain without seeming disrespectful and greedy. I’d been conned by an old lady! I’d made a nickel extra on the hag’s lawn, then lost a nickel on the sweet old lady’s anti-tip.

  Throughout my ‘vacation’ I never made more than thirty cents a day, but I worked every day it didn’t rain, except Sundays because Tonio said he’d be damned if any kid staying with him was going to take the Lord’s day in vain. When I told him it was the Lord’s name one took in vain, not His day, he muttered something about my being a wise-mouth, just like my mother...and crazy too, always talking to myself!

  One day I was pushing a dull mower over a big corner lawn for a crabbed old woman who watched me from behind her curtains, as though I was going to steal her grass or something. The overgrown lawn was full of hidden twigs the previous day’s storm had brought down from the trees, and these kept jamming the cutting blade, stopping the mower short and wrenching my wrists. It was miserable work: the air was heavy and muggy, sweat stung my eyes, my shoulders smarted where the old sunburn had peeled off leaving sensitive new skin, and the old blisters on my palms had broken and were weeping stickily. I was about halfway through when I heard a sound like ten thousand strips of bacon frying in a huge pan. This sound came sweeping down the street towards me, and before I could run for cover, the heaviest hailstorm I’ve ever known was ripping leaves off the trees, hissing into the grass, white ice pebbles bouncing up waist high. Gasping for breath and being stung by a thousand needles, I managed to get the mower back into the lady’s shed, then I dashed to her porch and shouted through the screen door over the din that I’d come back to finish when the storm stopped, and I ran off. By the time I got back to Aunt Lorna’s the hail had changed into a cold sleety rain and I was drenched and sneezing, so she put me into bed with a hot water bottle.

  I was in bed for three days with a feverish summer cold. By the time I was well enough to sit out on the porch, it was only a couple of days before my return to Pearl Street. But first I had to finish the lawn I had partly done when that monster hailstorm came in. The half I had already mowed had grown a little while I was sick in bed, and the old battle-ax made me mow the whole lawn because she wasn’t going to pay good money for a lawn that was uneven. The mowing was slow and difficult not only because the fever had left me weak but because the hail had knocked down a lot more twigs from her trees, and these jammed the mower even more often than before. It took me all day, and when I finished the woman gave me a glass of buttermilk as a cheapskate sort of tip. I’ve always hated buttermilk, but I drank it to spite her. It wasn’t until I was walking back to Aunt Lorna’s that I wondered if that had been stupid. What if it had been a glass of spit? Would I have drunk that to spite her, too?

  By the end of my vacation in Granville I had cut forty-seven lawns and earned, according to my pocket notebook, seven dollars and five cents, minus the twenty-five cents I squandered over the month on five Royal Crown Colas, which I bought after particularly exhausting lawns had left me with a raging thirst, too good a thirst to waste on water, so I bought a Royal Crown Cola (the biggest nickel bottle you could get) and I brought it home to my room, where I drank it slowly, savoring each sip from one of Tonio’s comic shot glasses that had on it a woman in a skin-tight dress bending over to tie her shoe, with the inscription ‘bottoms up!’ So my net earnings, after returning the last bottle for its two-cent deposit, were six dollars and eighty-two cents, including a Canadian dime that one of those sweet old ladies had slipped me.

  The last night before going home, I was sitting at my uncle’s kitchen table, listening to him brag about how some smart guys he knew made big money by buying up vacant factories and shops, insuring them to the hilt and then...whadda you know? They suddenly burned down! Tough luck! And he knew a couple of card sharks from Troy who cleaned suckers out slicker ’n shit. They’d let the sucker win for a while, then...whadda you know? His luck suddenly turns sour and he ends up stripped to the bone. And if the sucker complains...? Well, you don’t complain about these guys. They got friends, and their friends got ways...you get what I mean? (He winked.) Then Tonio asked what I was going to do with all the money I’d made while I was having a vacation at his expense, and I told him I was thinking of buying something nice for my mother. I’d never had enough money before for
a really nice present for her. He nodded. “That’s good. That’s a good boy.” Then he screwed up his eyes and looked up at the ceiling as though he were examining it for cracks. “Hey, I got it!” he cried. “T’maidas!”

  “Tomatoes?” I asked.

  He explained that the best thing I could possibly buy for my mom would be something the whole family could enjoy, because that way she’d feel good knowing we kids were getting decent food for a change. I started to object to the suggestion that my mother didn’t provide us with good food, but Uncle Tonio waved that aside with an impatient gesture and told me that six dollars and eighty cents wouldn’t buy shit these days. I said that was just fine with me, because shit wasn’t among the things I’d been considering, but he pressed on, saying that a quart can of tomatoes cost twenty-five cents in the store, and that was for just ordinary store-bought crap! But he knew where I could get three dozen quarts of high-quality home-canned tomatoes for seven bucks, which would be a saving of...well, about...well, quite a bit. “About six cents a can,” I calculated off the top of my head, which I knew would infuriate him. Then I reminded him that I didn’t have seven bucks, but he waved that objection away grandly. “What the hell. I’ll make up the difference myself.”

  I knew this oaf thought he was conning me, but still...it was cheaper than store-bought tomatoes, and my mother had often praised the vegetables her mother used to can every summer. A box of home-canned tomatoes might be just the present for her. It would certainly be a surprise. And if she wanted to, she could buy herself something nice with the money she saved on the tomatoes she wouldn’t have to buy all next year.

  The next morning the three of us piled into Tonio’s brand-new car after loading up three twelve-quart boxes of Mason jars containing tomatoes Lorna had put up the year before. At the last minute, Tonio had decided to drive me home rather than put out the money for my bus ticket. It had been intended that I pay my own way back home, but now all my money was in tomato futures. And anyway, it would give him a chance to show his car off to my mother, proof that Lorna hadn’t done so badly in marrying him after all. I asked if we shouldn’t telephone to Mr Kane’s store and ask him to tell my mother I wouldn’t be on the bus, but Tonio said that would be a stupid waste of money because we’d get there long before the bus.

  After getting lost twice because Tonio’s ‘short cuts’ tangled us in mazes of country lanes where he raged at his wife for not keeping her eye on the map...the least she could do, for Chrissake!...it was late afternoon before we got to Albany. We came in from the north through run-down neighborhoods, and for the last several blocks Tonio peered uneasily left and right with the expression of someone who has rolled back a rock and found disconcerting life forms under it. In fact, everything seemed a lot dirtier and more tawdry than I remembered. Flocks of screaming kids with runny noses and blue-daubed impetigo sores on their scalps; cracked windows repaired with peeling paper tape, broken ones replaced by cardboard or plywood; battered garbage cans on the curb; unshaven men in sweaty undershirts loitering on stoops; adolescent boys blocking the street with their games of stick ball, drawing back to the curb with sassy languor to let us by only after making us wait until the inning was over, and then giving Tonio churlish stares as he negotiated his way through the narrow opening they granted us; a fire hydrant spraying kids who had been suffering through a heat spell, but making Tonio wince at the water marks it made on his car’s polish...summer on North Pearl Street.

  Tonio pulled up at the high curb in front of 238, having decided that he’d better park close to our front window so he could keep an eye on his car. When he opened the door, it banged against the high curb and he swore between his teeth, then he squeezed out and bent over the blemish, which he tenderly tried to heal with spit on his finger, as though it were a scratched knee. Tonio got the tomatoes out of the trunk, and I led the way up the stoop and into our front hall, which smelled of leaking gas, rotting wood, mildew, crumbling plaster, eons of soaked-in steam from root vegetables, Lysol, roach powder and rat shit behind the baseboards...the whole bouquet of poverty, an olfactory background that I had become inured to over the years, but which I could smell again now after a month away had made my nose sensitive again. I was embarrassed on behalf of Pearl Street. Aunt Lorna, an obsessive house-cleaner, walked down the hall towards our door with her hands pressed flat against her hips so her new linen suit wouldn’t brush the walls.

  I knocked for the first and only time on our door, just in case Mother and Ben were...whatever. Mother opened it with a huge greeting smile that collapsed when she saw her cousin and Tonio behind me. She had expected me to come hours earlier, and she and Anne-Marie had made a welcome-home party while Ben awaited my arrival down at the bus station.

  “How’s the gal?” Tonio greeted as he pushed past his wife and me to disburden himself of the boxes of tomatoes. “Still skinny as a rail, I see! Me, I like mine with a little padding on ’em.” He patted Lorna’s hip. “But there’s guys who like ’em skinny. The closer to the bone, the sweeter the meat, they say! And Anne-Marie! Hey, I haven’t seen you since you were only that high! You’ve turned into a real looker!”

  “Hello, Lorna,” Mother said flatly. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

  Lorna started to explain that they had decided at the last moment to—

  But Mother cut her off with: “You might as well come in.” I knew from her tone that she could feel her cousin’s abhorrence of Pearl Street and she resented it. I glanced at Anne-Marie, who made big eyes, telling me she too felt the radiating antipathy and was apprehensive.

  To celebrate my return Mother had baked an apple pie, which I had proclaimed to be my favorite back when we could get dried apples from the surplus warehouse, but blueberry was my real favorite. Tonio insisted on being able to keep an eye on his car out front, so we gathered in the front room, rather than the kitchen, our guests in the old wicker armchairs that twisted and squeaked when you sat in them. One of the predacious broken canes immediately clawed at Lorna’s new linen suit and tore a little triangular rip that she assured Mother didn’t matter...was hardly noticeable, really and truly, don’t worry about it...but she couldn’t help fingering the rip ruefully. Mother, Anne-Marie and I lined up on the edge of my daybed like birds on a telephone wire, all awkwardly balancing the pie and drinks on our knees or putting them on the floor because my bedside table was filled to toppling with books. Lorna made a couple of hopeful rushes at conversation that my mother’s monosyllabic replies quashed. Time moved at a glacial pace.

  Ben returned from the bus station, hot and frustrated. He had waited while three buses arrived from the north, but I was not among the passengers, so he gave up and came home. There were awkward introductions and Ben ended up perched on the ledge of the open window, his cup of coffee and pie plate on the sill beside him, while Lorna tried not to look at his tooled cowboy boots and the big Stetson he forgot to take off until Mother reminded him. In standing up to put his hat on the mantel, he knocked his pie and coffee off the sill and dishes shattered on the pavement below.

  Ben excused himself, shaking his head at his awkwardness and admitting in his soft western burr that he’s always been as clumsy as a one-armed man trying to wipe himself with waxed paper. Both Mother and Lorna stiffened.

  “So, tell me...ah...Ben, is it?” Tonio began, playing the role of the protective brother-in-law. “I hear you’re a cowboy or something, is that right?”

  “I’ve been lots of things. I rode fence for a while in Wyoming, so I guess that makes me a cowboy.”

  “If you say so.” Tonio half rose from his wicker chair as a pair of neighborhood boys stopped beside his car to look it over. He was about to tap on the window and gesture them to move on—which would have been a serious mistake—when they drifted away on their own, so he settled back into the squeaking chair. “And so, what are you? I mean...are you a friend or a neighbor, or what?”

  “I live up on
the top floor.”

  “That’s handy.”

  “Handy?” Ben’s face darkened. “What do you mean, handy?”

  “Oh, I’m not suggesting anything. It’s just that...”

  To deflect the contentious path of this conversation, Lorna said quickly, “You know, hon, I’d just love another cup of coffee. And that apple pie...it’s just like your mother’s.” As Mother wasn’t looking at her, she turned to Anne-Marie. “Your grandmother always made her pies from two or three kinds of apples, one for sweetness, another for flavor, one that mushed up quickly, another to give texture. One of the apples she used was Northern Spy. I don’t remember the names of the others. Do you remember them, hon? If I’m not mistaken, they used to be your favorites...those Northern Spies?” She directed this last at my mother, seeking her help in smoothing things over. Mother didn’t help.

  Lorna laid her hand on Tonio’s sleeve. “I think we’d better be going. I hate to eat and run, but I’m afraid of these roads by night, and it’s already nearly—”

  “Wait a minute!” Tonio said. “I don’t need no bum’s rush. I wasn’t accusing nobody or nothing. I was just asking.”

  “Maybe it’s best not to ask,” Ben advised.

  Tonio rose and snatched down his celluloid cuffs in a brisk gesture, muttering, “...we give the kid a free vacation...get him out of this hole for a couple of weeks, and what thanks do we get?”

  Lorna turned to Mother. “Look, honey, I’ll write soon. It’d be a sin for you and me not to stay in touch.”

  “You can write,” Mother said, ceding little.

  “Come on, Tonio,” Lorna said, already at the door.