The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

by Trevanian

  If I came down with a bad cold and couldn’t do my route, the broker would send out one of his pets to cover it, and I would have to pay that kid ten cents a paper, no matter how much or little I collected that week; so my Mother used to bundle up and deliver my papers for me, taking twice as long as I did because she didn’t know the route, and costing us money on complaints for late papers, but at least we didn’t lose the paper route. There were two occasions when both of us were ill at the same time, me having caught her cold while caring for her, and this brought us to the edge of financial disaster, but still Mother steadfastly refused to touch Ben’s allotment savings.

  The purchasing power of our weekly $7.27 continued to dwindle because OPA price freezes slowed, but could not prevent, wartime inflation. And yet Mother stuck pugnaciously to her decision to save Ben’s allotments for their tourist cabins. The only money she would draw from their joint account was to pay for her divorce, which came through early in 1943. She reasoned that the divorce was as much for Ben as it was for her.

  For the first two months after Ben enlisted Mother got regular letters which she read to herself with a soft, elsewhere look in her eyes that was strangely, but pleasantly, inconsistent with the cocky, flash-tempered mixed-blood I knew. When Ben came back on a three-day embarkation pass, Anne-Marie and I were proud to be seen with him in his uniform with two stripes on his sleeve. With his knowledge of radio, he had scored the highest of his radio class and was made corporal almost immediately. I still have a photograph of the three of us together, the slightly overexposed streetscape of Pearl Street’s stoops receding diagonally behind us. I remember Mother taking this snapshot with her old billows Kodak, looking down into the viewer and moving back and forth to get the composition right. The embarkation leave was quickly over and we saw Ben off on his train. There followed a silence of several weeks that had us all worried until, one morning, we received a bundle of V-mail letters with words and addresses inked out. It seemed remarkable to me that Ben (a sergeant already) was in England, the England of Robin Hood and Sherlock Holmes, the place Edward R. Murrow’s voice came from, the frying crackle of short-wave lending realism and immediacy to his savory baritone descriptions of the blitz he was watching from a rooftop, bombs and ack-ack fire audible in the background.

  Nightly news broadcasts brought the nation to a standstill. Energetic children slowed to a hushed tip-toe at exactly six o’clock when their families clustered around radios to learn how the war was going; men in barbershops stopped wisecracking and frowned importantly at the radio in solemn silence; women decorating church basements stepped down from their ladders and listened, strands of crepe paper dangling from senseless fingers, everyone tense and vulnerable lest they hear something dreadful. After the newscasts came commentaries by men whose voices had become identified with the truth and with sympathetic concern: the didactic H. V. Kaltenborn;50 the atonic, unflappable Elmer Davis; the quaintly named Raymond Gram Swing; the plummy elocutionist, Lowell Thomas; the jabbering scandal-huckster, Walter Winchell; and the lugubrious doom-herald, Gabriel Heatter. But the most widely admired was Edward R. Murrow, who in later years would confirm his reputation as the nation’s most trusted journalist with his public demolition of that rabble-rousing national embarrassment, Senator Joseph McCarthy.

  • • • • • • • • •

  Spring came, then summer, and we were back in school when Ben’s letters told us he was being shipped out of England—he didn’t know his destination. Mother wrote to him on the kitchen table almost every evening after supper, while Anne-Marie and I did the dishes and sang Hit Parade top tunes. The most immediate effect of the war on popular music was a vogue for peppy marches like ‘American Patrol’, played in a Big-Band swing version. And there were pitch songs like ‘Any Bonds Today?’ which sought to sell Americans on the idea of paying for the war. Later the Hit Parade offered dramatic, wartime action songs like ‘Comin’ In on a Wing and a Prayer’ and ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition’ in which an Army chaplain mans a gun to kill the enemy...a spooky idea upon reflection, but I don’t recall thinking so at the time. Anne-Marie’s favorite for some months was the romantic ‘He Wears a Pair of Silver Wings’, and I got sardonic pleasure out of singing ‘Johnny Got a Zero’, the story of a dumb kid who had made bad grades in school, but who turned out to have a gift for shooting down Japanese pilots and was therefore praiseworthy...also spooky.51

  Hits of that first year of the war reflected the departing soldier’s worry lest the girl back home not remain faithful, such 1942 Hit Parade songs as ‘Somebody Else Is Taking My Place’ and the heartfelt entreaty, ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with anyone else but me)’. Presumably ‘sitting under the apple tree’ was a euphemism.

  Representing the girls at home, female band singers stepped up to the microphone and protested their innocence: ‘I Don’t Want to Walk Without You’ which is why I ‘Don’t Get Around Much Any More’; but perhaps the real reason they didn’t get around much was that the men back home were ‘Either Too Young or Too Old’.

  The boys overseas enjoined their girls to be faithful, but an entrenched double standard allowed them to admit that ‘I Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen’ and that ‘Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland’. (Obviously a song from the early months of the war, when the faceless soldier was still called by his First World War sobriquet, not yet having become a Government-Issued ‘G.I.’)

  In 1944–45, as the war approached its end, the guy-over-there would promise ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’ and warn his sweetheart that ‘It’s Been a Long, Long Time’. The gal-at-home responded by pledging ‘I’ll Walk Alone’ and assuring him that although she was ‘A Little on the Lonely Side’ she would have ‘No Love, No Nothin’’ until her baby came home. She declared that for good girls like her ‘Saturday Night Is the Loneliest Night of the Week’. My sister’s favorite of these assurances of Penelopean constancy was ‘I’m Making Believe’ in which the girl says that until her dreams come true she’ll kiss her pillow, making believe it’s you. Anne-Marie thought that gesture so poignant! So touching! So sweet! I sometimes had to step out into the back area for a little fresh air.

  It wasn’t only popular song lyrics that went to war; radio programs also rolled up their sleeves and joined the fight. In a Fibber McGee and Molly broadcast made just after the December 7 attack, both Fibber and Molly made cracks about the physical appearance of the Japanese, and about Hitler not being a functioning male. These strained jokes must have been inserted into the script at the last minute, leaving no room for Fibber to open his famous closet door—one of the few episodes from the house at 79 Wistful Vista not to include this classic sound-effects gag.

  Even the soothing, even-tempered Vic and Sade, who lived in ‘the little house half-way up the next block’, had nasty racial things to say about the Japanese. Overnight, cowboy Gene Autry became Sergeant Gene Autry (though he continued to serve his country from his ‘Flying A’ broadcast studio); and Kate Smith’s yeasty singing of ‘God Bless America’ instantly made her ‘America’s Sweetheart’, which the gals in her radio audience didn’t much mind, as Miss Smith’s corpulence rendered her unthreatening.

  The war touched even kids’ action programs. The Green Hornet’s faithful Japanese valet, Kato, suddenly became his faithful Filipino valet. And I remember the evening a gang of cattle rustlers on Red Ryder turned out to be Nazis trying to sap our soldiers’ strength by denying them good red American beef, a nasty underhanded plot that Red Ryder and his pals discovered while hiding in an echoey cave to spy on a newcomer in town, a smooth-talking dude who claimed to be a botanist combing the western hills in search of wild plants. The rustlers came riding into the cave and the ‘scientist’ relaxed his guard sufficiently to let his German accent slip out as he led them in a shout of ‘Heil Hitler!’ which all the kids listening accepted as just the sort of thing your typical evil smooth-talking Nazi scientist involved in ca
ttle rustling would shout in an echoey cave the minute he thought he couldn’t be overheard. But I had known that this Nazi botanist/rustler would turn out to be the bad guy from the minute I heard him asking Red directions at the beginning of the program. He used long words and he spoke with careful pronunciation, and it was a given of the Western genre, both on the radio and in the movies (it’s interesting that one was ‘on’ the radio but ‘in’ the movies) that anyone who used long words or spoke with precise diction was a bad’un.52

  The Hollywood sausage factory ground out a string of war films featuring a Whitman’s Sampler of the ‘all-American platoon’: one Scandinavian farm boy, simple, honest, wholesome, trusting...and inevitably the first to get it; one intense Italian who dreams of his mama’s cooking and tells us how proud his papa had been to see him in uniform; one spoiled rich Anglo-Saxon guy who is either hardened into manhood by the crucible of danger, or revealed to be a sniveling coward; one ‘other race’ (Latin Americans often substituted for Negroes...they were safer); one educated ‘professor’ type who learns that when the chips are down, the earthy, common sense of your average uncultured Joe Blow is more valuable (and oddly ‘wiser’) than all this world’s book learning; one ladykiller who brags about his romantic conquests, but in truth is lonely and has never known a woman’s touch; one mouthy comic from Brooklyn who will be the last to get it, dying with a wisecrack on his lips, his death enraging the tough, demanding (but deeply caring) officer played by the star of the film, who then snatches up an inexhaustible weapon and slays several thousand Nazis or Japs in an orgy of retribution while the audience cheers him on.53

  This was war waged in and by the media. War as it touched us on North Pearl Street was felt mostly in shortages and rationing. We were issued books of red stamps for meat and blue stamps for canned food. Such things as canned spinach or lima beans were never rationed (the things one liked least, of course). You got change from ten-point stamps in little one-point coinlike disks made from matte-finished Bakelite, red disks for meat, blue for other things. And there were special stamps in the back of your blue stamp book for sugar, lard and oleo. Butter, too, I suppose, but no one on Pearl Street ever bought butter. Food rationing had little effect on my family’s shopping, as we always ran out of money long before we ran out of ration stamps. Some of the poor used to sell their unused ration stamps to richer people. We were visited one afternoon by a sleazy middleman who was combing the slums, offering to buy ration stamps. Mother told him that one of our family was overseas in the army, and she’d be goddamned if she was going to help hoarders, war profiteers and slimy pigs like him to make money out of the war, so get the hell out of here!

  Gasoline was also rationed, most cars having minimal-allowance ‘A’ stickers on their windscreens. But the shortage of gasoline demanded no sacrifice from North Pearl Street; nobody owned a car.54

  It was not long before people started hanging service banners in their windows: a blue star for each member of the family in the armed forces, a silver one if he’d been wounded, and gold if he’d been killed. There was only one gold star on North Pearl Street. The oldest Brannon boy had run away to join the navy a couple of years before war broke out, and had died when his ship, the Arizona, sunk in Pearl Harbor. Just a week before the attack Mrs Brannon had received a present from her son, a silken pillow with hula girls embroidered on it and the words ‘Aloha from Honolulu’. She wept every time she saw it, so the Brannon kids told her to put it away until she felt better, but she said she felt better when she was crying.

  My mother hung a service banner with a blue star in our front window for Ben, and when she heard that Mrs Hanrahan had complained that we didn’t have a right to hang a banner because Ben wasn’t really a member of our family, she stormed upstairs to confront her, telling her that Ben was an orphan and we were the only family he had. And Ben was over there defending her constitutional right to be a pain in the ass, with her constant sniping and complaining! So put that in your hat and smoke it!

  I was coming back from the library by the shortcut through the back alley, when I caught a glimpse of Mr McGivney sitting up there behind his lace curtain, looking sightlessly out over the roofscape; and it occurred to me that maybe Mrs McGivney should hang out a service banner to honor her husband’s service to the country, even if it was two wars ago. Her banner should have a silver star because he had been wounded...in his mind anyway. But she probably didn’t even know the country was at war, having neither a radio nor the electricity to run it. The chances were that the complications of rationing were managed for her by Mr Kane, who kept the ration books of several of the block’s old people in a drawer under his counter and tore out the stamps as they were required. People who didn’t like Mr Kane—mostly those who had run up a big slate with him and now avoided his shop out of shame and out of anger at being made to feel ashamed, or the women of Mrs Kane’s circle who took her at her word when she declared that her husband was a hopeless dreamer, hence a failure—these people whispered that he used those ration cards to supply a city-wide blackmarket operation. And when his defenders said that they’d never seen anything fishy going on over there, his detractors would nod and say: Of course you don’t see anything! They’re sly, these people. Nor was this the only instance of a lack of evidence being used as corroboration of an accusation against Mr Kane. When one of his customers died, it was his custom to send a note of condolence to the family and to include in it a bill for the outstanding slate with ‘paid in full’ written across the top. If you imagine that this kindness endeared Mr Kane to North Pearl’s collective heart, you are not reckoning with the subtleties and depths of prejudice. His humane gesture was taken as evidence that he had been criminally over-charging us for years. How else would he be rich enough to be able to write off ten or fifteen dollars just like that? And if he thinks we’re going to bow and be grateful for being squeezed out of our money...well, forget it!

  One evening shortly after the first Thanksgiving of the war, Mrs McGivney came across to Mr Kane’s cornerstore just before he closed up. Following his custom, Mr Kane asked the last-minute customers if they wouldn’t mind, and he went to the end of the counter to greet Mrs McGivney and ask what she needed today. She spoke so quietly that he had to bend his head close to hear. “What’s that?” he asked. She repeated what she had said in a whisper, her eyes lowered as though she were telling him something intimate and shameful. He patted her shoulder and drew her gently through the door that led to the living quarters behind the store, so she could sit in the room Mrs Kane used as a Beauty Shop/Tea Salon. He said a few words to his wife, who offered Mrs McGivney a cup of tea, impatiently anticipating the moment when she would be able to retail her news to the neighborhood.

  Mr Kane returned to his shop, took a nickel out of the till, looked up a number in the telephone directory and dialed. He turned his back on the waiting customers who pretended to be examining the air for defects while their ears strained to overhear what Mr Kane was saying with his hand curled over the speaking cup.

  About a quarter of an hour later, an ambulance came down the street and stopped in front of the McGivneys’ apartment house. Two men in green uniforms brought a stretcher up the stoop and disappeared into the building. The entire street had by now found reason to sit out on their stoops, or to stand around on the sidewalk, just having a breath of nice cold air this fine brisk evening. The men in green came back out wearing gauze masks and carrying Mr McGivney’s body down the steps. He was tied onto the stretcher, a sheet covering his face, but not his bare toes with their thick yellow nails. Mrs McGivney stood with Mr Kane at the foot of the steps and watched them slide the stretcher into their ambulance, then drive off. She waved uncertainly after the departing vehicle, then Mr Kane brought her back across the street to stay with them for a day or two, until the public health men had come to fumigate and air out her apartment.

  This was the first most people on the block knew of Mr McGivney’s ex
istence, and some of them felt personally affronted that they had been kept in the dark all those years. When word spread that someone had overheard one of the public health men say that the old guy must have been dead for quite a while, a shudder went up and down the block, and for a time there were rumors that the authorities were going to send Mrs McGivney to Poughkeepsie. The idiom throughout the Hudson River Valley for being put into an insane asylum was being ‘sent to Poughkeepsie’, a reference to this town’s large establishment for people with mental problems.55

  But Mrs McGivney didn’t go to Poughkeepsie. By the end of the week she was back in her apartment. A few weeks later, close to Christmas, I was coming through the back alley late one evening and I glanced up. My heart almost stopped when I saw Mr McGivney in his usual place behind the lace curtains, his silhouette dimly halo’d by nacreous gaslight. I gasped. But how...? No, wait a minute. It wasn’t Mr McGivney; it was his wife. She was sitting in his straight-backed chair, looking out just like he used to. Had she taken over his responsibility for keeping an eye on the alley? Did she sometimes brush her hair with his brush?

  I wondered why anyone would spend time looking out at a deserted alley. What was the point? Then I thought about myself sitting on the edge of my daybed late into every night with my Hudson Bay around my shoulders, looking out at the empty street. Watching what? Expecting what? Fearing what?

  Over the next couple of weeks, people on the block often glanced up uneasily towards Mrs McGivney’s floor as they passed 232, and they would pull their necks into their collars and shudder. The superstitious Irish of North Pearl Street did not want to be reminded of Death, nor were they comforted when Mrs Kane (the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, born with a caul over her face) assured her gossip clique that bad things always come in threes. And sure enough...