The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

by Trevanian

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Mother’s attention drift again and again to the large package behind all the others, the one wrapped in mysterious oriental paper. She had a suspicion that it was for her and was itching to know what it was, but she didn’t want to seem eager. Back before I began to make money with my paper route, she had always pretended that she didn’t like to receive presents. She admitted that she didn’t know why she didn’t like presents, but that’s the way she was. I knew, of course, that this was a lie to cover for spending all our money on gifts for Anne-Marie and me.

  Slyly pleased that she was consumed with curiosity, and anticipating her delight when she opened it, I dragged the moment out. It wasn’t until this last present had sat alone under the tree for a quarter of an hour that she said in an offhand tone suggesting she had just noticed it, “Say, what the hell is that back there? The thing wrapped in the funny paper?”

  I told her I had no idea. “Something from Santa Claus, I guess. Why don’t we just leave it there and maybe open it after dinner...if we want to.”

  We exchanged glances and she smiled. “All right, all right! I guess I might as well take a peek at it.”

  She unwrapped it with tantalizing slowness, carefully folding up the ornate oriental paper before lifting off the lid. When she set eyes on the cobalt-blue teapot encrusted with raised figures of birds and flowers she sighed with pleasure. One by one, she took out the cups and saucers and plates and arranged them before her on the table.

  “I know you don’t drink tea, but...” I shrugged.

  “That doesn’t matter. I’ll just set them out so I can look at them. You know how I love fine things. It’s my French blood. And these are so pretty and delica...” She had picked up one of the small plates and was reading the bottom. Her expression froze. She looked at me. “Made in Japan?”

  “Yeah, well...” Ben intervened. “The Japanese are known for their beauti...”

  “They’re known for sneak attacks that kill American boys, that’s what they’re known for!” Mother said. “Jean-Luc...how could you? What in God’s name were you thinking of?”

  “I didn’t know it was made in Japan! I bought it more than a month ago! Long before Pearl Harbor!”

  “That’s no excuse!”

  “What do you mean, it’s no excuse? Of course it’s an excuse!”

  “Don’t raise your voice to me, young man.”

  “I’m not raising my voice. It’s just that—”

  “And don’t contradict me! You take this Japanese crap away and do whatever you want with it. Me, I never want to set eyes on it again! No one’s going to accuse me of keeping Jap stuff in my house, believe me you!”

  “It’s believe you me.”

  “What?!”

  “It’s not believe me you! Believe you me! You always, always say it wrong!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about how you get lots of things wrong! It’s embarrassing and stupid.”

  “Are you saying your mother is embarrassing?”

  “Sometimes, yes!”

  “Well...I like that!”

  “You don’t have to like it, Mom! Just accept it.”

  “Like it or lunk it, eh? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Lump it, Mom.”

  “What?”

  “Lump it. No one says lunk it!”

  “What are you talking about? Everyone says like it or lunk it. Don’t they, Anne-Marie?”

  “I’m reading my Deanna Durban book.”

  “And anyway, what’s all that got to do with giving your own mother Japanese crap for Christmas? Answer me that, Mister Know-It-All!”

  “Nothing! It doesn’t have anything to do with it. And I’m getting out of here!” I stormed out into the hall and down the stoop into the street, where I stood in my shirtsleeves with my back against the building, protected from the worst of the snowfall but taking grim pleasure in the big, lazy snowflakes that collected on my eyelashes. Maybe I’d get sick and die. That would teach her. After a couple of minutes Ben came out, also without a jacket, and stood beside me, his back against the wall, his hands in his pockets, looking out through the falling snow onto the empty street. We didn’t speak.

  After a while he cleared his throat and said, “Your Mom...she’s crying in her bedroom.”

  I shrugged.

  “Look, Luke, I’m sorry she took on that way. She shouldn’t have done that. But you understand, don’t you? I mean, what with the war and all...and me having to go away and fight. Naturally, she’s...” It was his turn to shrug.

  After a long silence, I complained to the snowfall before us, “I get sick and tired of that French-and-Indian temper of hers! It spoils everything. Oh, I know she loves us kids and all. And she works until she’s sick to give us presents. She’s a great giver. She’s always giving. But when it comes to receiving, she’s crap!”

  “You don’t have to tell me, partner. She wasn’t all that hot on my ring.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry about that.”

  “But she’s a great gal, your mom. Brave and strong and lots of fun and all that stuff. Nobody’s perfect. You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth.” He chuckled. “I didn’t think anyone but me noticed those funny things she says. Like ‘believe me you’.”

  “How about ‘put that in your hat and smoke it’? Have you heard that one?”

  He laughed. “No, it’s a new one on me. Hey, I’m getting colder than....there’s a saying about the balls of a brass monkey, but your mom wouldn’t like it. What do you say you and me go back inside? I’ll show you how to work that slide rule.”

  “All right.”

  We were working at the kitchen table, our heads close together over the book of logarithms, when Mother came in and silently began to make coffee in the percolator. Her eyes were damp and red. Ben pushed my knee with his, and I got up and put my arms around her. “Sorry, Mom. I should have checked to see where those things came from.”

  “It’s not your fault, son. The man who sold them to you should have told you.”

  When, later that evening, it occurred to me to look for it, I couldn’t find the tea set anywhere. It wasn’t until a month or so later that I happened upon it on the top shelf of her wardrobe, back in the excelsior-filled box that she had carefully re-wrapped in its decorative Japanese rice paper with little autumn leaves pressed into it. I knew that like the Mason jars of tomatoes, those cups would never be used in our house.

  Night came and we turned off the lights except for the little blue-and-white Christmas tree bulbs that reflected a million times in strands of tinsel. Ben picked out tunes on his mandolin, and we all sang along. Mostly old songs, sad ones like ‘My Buddy’ and ‘Sonny Boy’ and ‘That Old Gang of Mine’ which suggested ‘Those Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine’, and that led us to ‘And Let the Rest of the World Go By’ and ‘Me and My Shadow’ and ‘Maybe’. These old songs of friendship, love and loss were followed by a recent Hit Parade number that blended contemporary history with nostalgia for times past, ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’, and we ended up singing hits from 1941, the year that would be history in just a week...the last year of peace.48 It was very late and we were all a little hoarse by the time we finally went to bed, Mother and Anne-Marie into our back bedroom, Ben up the stairs to his top-floor room. I sat up for a couple of hours, watching the snow that slanted down close to our window, the flakes tinted by the blue lights of that splendid Christmas tree.

  Despite the tea service fiasco and my spat with Mother, the memory of the four of us sitting in the front room, Mother and Ben in the squeaking rattan chairs that had come with the apartment, Anne-Marie and I sprawled at opposite ends of my daybed, singing together softly in the dim blue-and-white light, remains for me after more than sixty years an iconographic image of Christmas,
a moment rendered poignant by the unspoken knowledge that Ben and so many men and boys from our block were going off into danger, and might not come back. In fact, several didn’t.

  • • • • • • • • •

  We all went down to Union Station to see Ben off to Fort Dix. Impressed by the fact that Ben was studying radio design on his own and was proficient at Morse code, and by the high scores he had made on the basic tests, the enlistment officer had designated him for the Signal Corps, where Ben hoped to learn things he could use to get a better job when the war was over. He regretted that he and Mother had to wait two years before they could marry, because if they were married Mother would be entitled to widow’s benefits if something happened to him. But he wanted to take care of us as best he could, so he had brought Mother downtown and set up a joint bank account into which he intended to send a portion of his pay in the form of what were called ‘allotment checks’. He told Mother to use some of this money to continue Anne-Marie’s dancing lessons, but the bulk was to be saved as a nest egg to start the Double-R-Bar Tourist Cabins in Wyoming just as soon as this war was over, which would surely be by next Christmas because how long could a ranting maniac with a Charlie Chaplin mustache and a bunch of near-sighted Japs hold out against an aroused America?

  We had all dressed up in our finest to see him off, and we had cups of hot chocolate in the crowded station cafeteria while we waited for his name to be called over the loudspeaker...the first time we had eaten out since our arrival in Albany. And the last time too, Mother declared, at these prices! Ben found their song, the 1940 hit ‘Only Forever’, on the jukebox. He put in a nickel to play it, and Mother squeezed his hand under the table. Silent tears filled Anne-Marie’s eyes. We stood on the platform in a dense pack of friends, family and lovers, all of us waving good-bye as the train pulled out with hissing jets of steam that billowed up into the platform lights. Men hung out train windows, waving as the train slipped into the dark tunnel, the edge of its shadow chopping off one waving soldier after another. Then the three of us walked back to North Pearl Street through a fresh snow that covered the sooty slush, making everything look clean and beautiful.

  That night I sat up for a time, working out problems with the slide rule Ben had taught me to use, then I lifted my eyes from my work and numbly watched the street through a muffling curtain of snow. Everything was so quiet and still. The three of us were alone again...just as though Ben had never come into our lives. And suddenly I got a scary idea: what if there never had been a Ben, with his plans to take care of Mother for the rest of her life? What if I had made him up, like I made up so many characters for my story games? Made him up because I so much wanted someone to relieve me of responsibility for her future. How could I find out without the risk of everybody finding out that I had gone crazy? If I asked about him tomorrow and he didn’t exist, they’d all know I was a nutter. No, I’d just have to wait for someone to mention his name...then I’d be safe. Am I crazy? I don’t feel crazy. But then, crazy people don’t feel crazy...because they’re crazy!

  But the next morning, Mother announced that she had decided not to touch a penny of Ben’s allotment money. “Not a penny! When he comes back, I want to see the surprise on his face when he sees how much we’ve saved up for Wyoming!”

  Yeah, I thought to myself, that’s a great idea, but what about Anne-Marie’s dancing lessons? Prices for everything had jumped up a notch as soon as war was declared, but our welfare income had remained the same. And we had come to depend on the extra dollars Ben gave us for his meals. It was obvious that we would need an additional source of money, and it was equally evident that it was up to me to find it. But where?

  Frankly, I was beginning to tire of hearing about that ‘place in Wyoming’, tired of pinning our hopes on so flimsy a fantasy. I felt that hope was a dangerous thing because it made you vulnerable to disappointment. Ben had made Mother’s nose wrinkle with an earthy adage describing those who waste their time hoping and dreaming: ‘Like the fella said: Hope in one hand and shit in the other, and see which fills up first’.

  In the end, through the good offices of Mr Kane I got a second paper route to pay for Anne-Marie’s tap lessons without touching Ben’s allotment money. A newspaper broker used to bring Mr Kane a handful of Sunday papers for his customers, and one Sunday he mentioned that he was looking for a kid from the neighborhood to deliver papers, and Mr Kane recommended me. So now I had two paper routes, one for the Times-Union and another for the Knickerbocker News. Technically, I was still under the legal age to have a paper route, and it was against the rules for the same kid to deliver the two rival papers, but this broker, a slimy Dickensian gnome with mossy teeth and a taste for boys, routinely hired kids too young to have paper routes legally, reasoning that they wouldn’t dare complain when he cheated them. But he was having trouble finding anyone to take a route in our neighborhood, where people who could afford a daily paper were so few and far between that seventy-five papers, the average for a five-block route, covered a twelve-block area. This meant that the kid had to walk more than twice as far and climb twice as many staircases to deliver the standard number of papers. Another thing that made my neighborhood unpopular with paperboys was the great number of deadbeats, some just because they were cheap, but most because they were poor. This made collecting hard and sometimes perilous, because frustration and shame could turn a drunken man into a bully when he was asked to cough up a quarter for his week’s five papers.

  Between the two paper routes, I carried a daily average of a hundred and fifty papers, which obliged me to start an hour earlier than the other newsies and to make two trips up to the brokers’ because I couldn’t carry a hundred fifty papers at one go. This and the exceptional length of my route meant that now I had to respond to our sadistic alarm clock at four-thirty every weekday morning in order to get to school on time. And four-thirty was suddenly earlier and darker and colder when, in February of 1942, all clocks in the United States went one hour ahead of standard time to save on fuel by reducing the need for lighting in the evenings. This ‘Standard War Time’ (in summer we changed to double daylight savings time) continued until September of 1945. So those were war time years in the literal sense.

  Mother did everything she could to help me. Except when her lungs betrayed her, she never failed to get up and make my breakfast and, on rainy or snowy mornings, to make sure I wore my galoshes and was muffled up to the ears. And she always said, ‘God bless you, son’ when I left to go out into the dark and the cold. Which is a little odd, considering how she felt about God.

  The newspaper business in the Albany of my day did not favor the newsie, who paid his broker four cents per paper and charged his customers five, so in theory he made a penny for every paper he delivered. For me, that would have been about a buck fifty a day, or seven fifty a week, more than we got from welfare and enough to pay for Anne-Marie’s tap lessons and still save some for big emergencies or little pleasures. But the paperboy paid for his papers in advance, so when a customer stiffed him, it wasn’t just his penny profit that the kid lost, it was also the four cents he’d paid for each paper. One deadbeat running behind for several weeks before either dropping his subscription or being cut off by the paperboy would reduce your takings by twenty-five cents a week. Because so many of the people on my paper routes were either poor or stingy, I never had fewer than a dozen deadbeats in any given week, and this cut my seven and a half dollars in half. While most of the customers eventually paid up to keep me from cutting them off, a fair percentage of them were old hands at the scam of quitting their subscription, then starting a new one the next day, and the paperboy was obliged by the circulation office to accept this ‘new’ customer. And why not? After all, the newspaper company wasn’t losing any money, and the broker was still getting his four cents per paper. Only the newsie was out of pocket.49

  I did well to make three fifty a week from eighteen hours of pre-dawn delivering in
all weathers, and an additional tense four or five hours each Saturday, when I went around the route making my collections. I could have made a little more if I had been quick to cut my losses before the deadbeats got very far behind, but both crippling compassion and crippling hope kept me from cutting them off as soon as they stopped paying. An instance of crippling compassion would be the old people for whom the arrival of their paper was the only incident in a lonely day, and their only contact with the world beyond their door. An example of crippling hope would be when a customer already owed me for a month, and I knew that once I dropped him that money was lost forever, so I would con myself into believing that maybe, just maybe, he might pay up and I’d have an extra dollar and a quarter to drop into the Dream Bank. This hope caused me to extend his credit for one more week...then one more week...then just one more...until finally he’d move away or drop his subscription and leave me flat. The other situation that trapped me into compassionate losses was when the woman (it was usually the woman with a crying, squirming baby that you had to deal with, while the husband kept out of sight) wept when you threatened to stop delivering the paper, saying that her husband needed the want ads to look for work. What would they do if they didn’t have a paper? I swear that word of my vulnerability on this ground must have spread among my customers, because I heard that tale so often. I knew, of course, that it was true in only a few cases. But which ones?

  Mrs Hanrahan, who lived in my own building, was typical of the bad customer. She complained that her papers came late, or weren’t delivered at all, or were dirty, or had already been opened and read by some phantom paper-snooper, and on these grounds she would refuse to pay her bill. I twice cut her from my list, but both times she immediately subscribed again, and I was obliged to deliver to her, even though she never, never, never paid up. And if I simply refused to drop off her paper, she would be served by one of the paper broker’s ‘favorites’ and I would be charged ten cents for each paper.