by Trevanian
Old Joe Meehan, who was mate, father, grandfather, brother, uncle or several of the above to everyone in that inbred tangle, hadn’t been seen on the street for a while, and the rumor was that he was lying on a mattress somewhere in the Meehan warren, sick and abandoned. It was after midnight and I was dozing at my window when suddenly a door across the street burst open and slammed against the side of the building with enough force to shatter its window. Old Joe came lurching down the stoop wearing dirty, slack-knee’d longjohns and a red knitted cap with a tassel. He was barefoot, and his toes looked like crooked claws. He staggered down the deserted street and stood on the edge of a cone of light from the streetlamp, the tassel of his cap swinging before his eye, one foot rooted in place, the other shifting back and forth to keep his balance as he glared angrily up into the starless city sky. He reached a long bony arm up into the shaft of light and shook his fist. “Screw ya!” he croaked. “You hear what I’m sayin’? This is Joseph Michael Meehan saying: Screw ya! And screw all the angels and archangels too, while you’re at it!” He stumbled over to the gutter and sat down heavily on the curb, his elbows on his knees and his palms pressed into his eye sockets. Lights came on in a nearby apartment and a head peeked through curtains, but no one had any intention of getting mixed up in a Meehan brawl, especially a brawl between Old Joe and God. When I looked back, Old Joe had slumped over and was lying on his side with his butt overhanging the gutter, his knees up to his chest and his cheek on his palm, like a kid. Two of the Meehan men came out and tried to pick him up, but they couldn’t, not because he resisted, but because he was so limp that his body kept slumping through their arms and folding up between their legs. With his trap-door longjohns and his tasseled cap, Old Joe was a figure of slapstick comedy, a Mack Sennett gag. A sad one.
I watched until the ambulance came and collected the body about an hour later. The next day, people who passed would glance angrily from Mrs McGivney’s windows across to the Meehans’, annoyed to be reminded of Death a second time. Our block worried about death the way richer neighborhoods worried about burglars and vandals and child snatchers. Pearl Street’s children were already in the hands of street forces; we had nothing to interest burglars; and anything worth vandalizing we had already vandalized ourselves. All we had was our lives, and therefore we worried a lot about death. Death had visited our block twice now, and everyone remembered Mrs Kane’s prediction that bad luck always comes in threes, so they held their breaths until Mrs Kane was told by a women who had her tea leaves read regularly (just in case) that her aunt in Cohose had slipped in her bathroom and bruised her knee badly. “There it is!” Mrs Kane pronounced triumphantly. “What did I tell you? The third fatality!” When one of the women had the temerity to mention that Cohose was a long way from Pearl Street, and that a bruised knee, even a badly bruised one, didn’t really qualify as a fatality, Mrs Kane shook her head ruefully and reminded her that Fate doesn’t always conform to human expectations. If it did, what need would people have for someone who was born with a caul over her face and therefore had the gift of being able to see the future in the bottom of a teacup?
• • • • • • • • •
In addition to the service banners hanging in our windows, the ration stamps and disks cluttering up the bottom of handbags, and the new steel pennies that replaced copper ones in 1943 because copper was needed in wartime production, the war brought us those scrapmetal drives to which kids contributed by breaking into scrap yards and stealing stuff they had previously contributed, and contributing it again. The war also made itself felt in ‘shortages’ that caused us to save waste paper and used cooking fat, and to flatten tin cans, until trucks came around to collect them. Because the rubber plantations of southeast Asia were in Japanese hands, it was impossible to buy a new tire for a bike or a wagon unless you ‘knew somebody’; and silk stockings had disappeared from the shops because silk was needed for parachutes, so young women shaved their legs closely, dyed them a light tan, and got a girlfriend to draw lines up the back of their calves to simulate the seams of stockings. Entrepreneurs quickly rushed into the market with expensive ‘silk stocking’ dyes and ‘Seams Real’ marker pencils specifically designed for this patriotic purpose, but the thrifty young women of North Pearl Street made do with diluted iodine or walnut oil for dye and eyebrow pencils for the seam line.
Lucky Strike cigarettes wrung every drop of advertising advantage out of their new white package by claiming that the green dye they had previously used had been requisitioned for the war effort. “Lucky Strike Green Goes to War!” declared the radio announcers in strident, courageous voices, as though the tobacco company was sacrificing itself to rid the world of the Nazi scourge, and so our boys might come back safe and well.56
Despite her worries about Ben and the pressure of wartime inflation that tightened our budget with every passing week, Mother still managed to be fun. Sometimes she would push the furniture to the edges of the middle room and show us the Charleston, the Varsity Drag, the Bunny Hug, the Turkey Trot or the Castle Walk.57 She was a natural performer who blossomed under appreciation and applause. She taught Anne-Marie how to do the Jackson Strut, which they would perform together, side by side, with me as the clapping, whistling audience.58
After the early panic, patriotism, paranoia and profiteering passed, America accepted war as the natural state of things with surprising equanimity. In my routine of school, homework, the paper route and radio-listening there was little time for the story games that had sustained my early years on North Pearl, and I assumed that I had outgrown the need for them. Without these games, I had the long Saturday afternoons free after I returned, tight-stomached, from often confrontational and never totally successful collection rounds. I often spent Saturday afternoons watching movies at the Strand Theater, because I had worked out how to sneak in through a second-balcony fire door. This involved slipping down a narrow, slimy alley clogged with dented garbage cans to the back of the theater, where, unseen, I would scale its brick wall, which had a decorative recessed course every two feet and was therefore suitable to my felonious purposes. I would work my long, dicey way up to the third-story level, blowing and panting with effort and fear, but maintaining purchase on the gritty brick with just my fingertips and the tips of my tennis shoes, careful not to look down lest the view of the ground far below chill my stomach and make my hands go weak. When I reached the level of a big cantilevered iron fire escape I paused to build up the courage (actually it was more desperation than courage) to release my trembling fingertip grip on the edge of the brick and grasp the bottom step of the fire escape, which I would ‘ride’ back down to the level of the alley, always careful to keep it from banging on the cement and alerting ushers whose sole purpose in life was to deny me the enjoyment and enlightenment of the movies just because I didn’t have the money for a ticket. Now the dangerous part was over and the tricky part began. I would slowly mount the fire escape to the point at which my weight was insufficient to hold it down against the counterweights that normally kept it up out of the reach of larcenous brats trying to sneak into the movies. As the stairs started rising, I would inch back down to control the speed of ascent, ultimately finding a balance point at which I could make them rise slowly and silently by shifting my weight back and forth. When finally I managed to coax the fire escape back up in place without clanging hard against the wall and warning the ushers within, I began the third phase of the complex Rififi heist film machinations I went through every Saturday to save fifteen cents. With the twelve-inch ruler I had taped to my leg, I tripped the latch of the heavy metal door which had no outside handle, because it was a press-bar fire door. Taking several deep breaths to ready myself, I would snatch the door open, enter the curtained-off exit niche of the second balcony, then close the door quickly/softly behind me, hoping that the flash of daylight around the edges of the curtain hadn’t alerted ushers down on the first floor; but they had their hands full with the mob of
chattering, whistling, hooting, foot-stamping kids impatiently awaiting the beginning of the show. The balconies were always empty and roped off during these afternoon performances because...well, what theater manager in his right mind would let a street kid sit in the front row of a balcony with a paper cup of soda in his hand and a sea of vulnerable heads beneath him? I accomplished the move from the empty second balcony to the anonymity of the crowded orchestra by first going down to the mezzanine where the toilets were. When the coast was clear, I would slip into the men’s room, where I would stand at the trough with my pecker out, looking down at the sodden cigarette butts until a couple of kids came in together, then I would mime shaking off and I’d wash my hands carefully, wasting time until they were through and I could descend with them, smiling and asking them questions about the movies we were going to see, so it looked to the ever-vigilant ushers like we were all chums together.
When I didn’t go to the movies on Saturday afternoon because it was raining or snowing and the brick wall was too slippery and dangerous, or because something was playing that I didn’t care to see, like a romantic film, or a musical, or anything by Disney, I would spend my afternoon in the library. At the age of twelve, I received an adult card that permitted me to take out anything I pleased; but I missed the adventure of sneaking up the iron spiral staircase from the basement children’s library to my cozy niche above the gurgling Gothic radiator where I had sat in the light of the stained-glass window and read books I had nicked from the return carts. One rainy afternoon after I had my adult card I thought about how pleasant it used to be, reading in that warm niche while rain running down the windows caused rivulets of colored shadow to ripple over my page, so I brought a book to my old nest in the hope of recapturing the zest of those stolen hours, but I couldn’t concentrate because I was afraid that someone might find me there, and I would look like an ass, hiding away to read what I had every right to check out and read, now that I had an adult card. I guess it’s true that you can’t go home again. Each moment has its place in the flow of time, then the moment passes, and if you reach back for it, you come up with a handful of dust.
• • • • • • • • •
Ben’s appearance on the scene had let me ease myself out of the center of our tight little family. Except for routine responsibilities like my paper route and household chores, I was free to drift on the edges of my mother’s life, and she didn’t seem to miss me. But after Ben was shipped overseas, she began to slip into ‘the blues’ more often and more deeply than before she met him. Almost every evening she would sit at the kitchen table after supper, writing to him, while Anne-Marie and I did the supper dishes. She always used V-Mail, those one-page letters that folded up to become their own envelope and didn’t require a stamp if addressed to someone in the armed forces, and she made up for the lack of space by writing in a small, tight hand that must have cramped and crispened what she said.
The winter of 1942–43 came early, cold and hard, the first heavy snows falling in mid-November. Restrictions on coal meant that I had to bank the furnace at nine o’clock every night, and the building became chilly enough that you could see your breath by the time I went down to the basement to stoke it up again the next morning at four-thirty, before starting my paper round. As the first year of the war came to its end, the excitement and newness faded into grim routine, and people began to wonder how long these shortages and high prices would last. The regular stream of Ben’s letters from England suddenly stopped, and Mother became preoccupied and tetchy. Then the radio announced the landing of American forces on the shores of French colonial North Africa, and she felt sure Ben was among them. She confessed to me that she had a premonition that something terrible had happened to him. She could feel it in her bones. It turned out she was right.
It was the first Saturday in December, almost the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, when the mailman knocked on our door because the chubby packet of V-mail letters he had for us wouldn’t fit into our mailbox. Ben was indeed in North Africa. He had written every day while he waited in communicative quarantine to sail from England with the invasion force, and twice a day during the long, slow, dull, but tense voyage as his convoy skirted the Iberian peninsula, rendezvous’d with the convoy originating in the United States, passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, then lay at anchor off the coast of Algeria. All these letters had been found in his kit and returned to him in the hospital after he was wounded during the landing at Oran. To this bundle of letters he had added another, scribbling on the outside of its envelope ‘read this first’. This note told her that he was recovering from a flesh wound in his side (wounded by a French bullet, he underlined bitterly) but he was being well taken care of. In fact, he was at that moment sitting in the forecourt of a French resort hotel that had been converted into a field hospital overlooking the sparkling Mediterranean. Oh...by the way...he was officially a hero, having received a Purple Heart. Oh, and another thing. Mother would have to change the way she addressed his letters, now that he had made staff sergeant. He ended by saying that considering his lofty rank and his status as a hero, he expected one hell-of-a-lot of respect when he got home, and maybe even a little obedience...just kidding. Ha-ha!
We were all relieved that Ben was all right, but from that time on Mother seemed to flinch inside whenever someone knocked at our door, as though she were expecting bad news. Ben’s long silence, then his wound had put an end to her feeling that their future out West was certain and inevitable.
Sometimes at night, when Anne-Marie was asleep and I was reading, Mother would come in and sit on the edge of my daybed and ask what my book was about, or what I was studying in school, and I knew she was down in the dumps and needed company, so I would suggest a late-night game of honeymoon pinochle, which was really what she had come in for. She always protested that I needed my sleep, what with having to get up early in the morning to start the boiler and do my paper round, and she would only agree to a game when I insisted that I was feeling tense and maybe a game or two would help me get to sleep. We would go into the kitchen which we could warm up by lighting one of the gas burners. She would make hot chocolate if we had the milk, and we would play at the kitchen table. I must have inherited some of my blood father’s card-playing genes because I had long ago become much better at pinochle than she, but I contrived to let her win most of the time. I would absent-mindedly fail to meld part of what I had, or I would weaken my playing hand by sloughing the highest card I could without winning the trick. I was afraid that she might catch me letting her win, but she was always too exhilarated by her narrow victories to notice, especially when, after over-bidding, she managed to save herself by taking good fat tricks towards the end of the hand, snapping her winning cards down on mine with gusto. Because she took such pleasure in winning, I didn’t mind losing, but it always seemed that as soon as I decided to lose, the ironic Gods of Chance would send me the greatest hands of my life, so it was not only a crying shame to lose, but difficult too.
Playing cards was not our only home entertainment. There was also the radio, and endless games of ‘twenty questions’, and at night as we did the supper dishes, Anne-Marie and I would challenge each other to ‘Name That Tune’. One of us would hum or whistle a couple bars and the other had to guess the song. Anne-Marie knew more popular music than I did, but my memory for lyrics was infallible. I knew the words to all the hits of the 1941–42 season.59
Another game we played was called One Hundred Dollars! (Anne-Marie and I agreed that the exclamation mark was part of the name). Each of us was allotted a fictional hundred dollars to spend on anything in the Montgomery Ward catalogue. We each had a strip of brown bag paper and a pencil to make our list, and at the end we voted on who had made the best buys. (Anyone who had more than two dollars left over automatically lost.) Anne-Marie usually bought clothes for herself together with bits of fringe and ruffle and ribbon to personalize the generic styles, but she always remembered
to get at least one present for Mother and one for me, which was something neither Mother nor I ever thought of. Mother bought things for the house, mostly sensible, but occasionally decorative, like three wrought-iron fish in diminishing sizes that she could hang on the tiled wall of our future bathroom in Wyoming to give it ‘that decorator touch’. I usually bought things I thought I might be able to make money with: tools for use as a hired handyman, or paintbrushes, a ladder and white bib overalls with a white cap to equip myself as a freelance house painter.
While Anne-Marie and I compared lists, defending our choices while ridiculing the other person’s, my mother would mend our socks and clothes using the wooden egg with a screw-in handle. That old hickory egg was the only memento she had of her mother. Some of her darning was so extensive that it amounted to re-weaving, just to make worn-through knickerbockers last another month or two. I had seen a war movie at the Grand in which Germans tossed ‘potato masher’ hand grenades at French partisans, and it occurred to me that my mother’s darning egg would make a perfect German hand grenade, so the next day I snuck (that was the past participle in Pearl Street usage) it from her sewing box and hurled it with devastating effect at nests of Nazis from one end of our back alley to the other. But the darning egg got dented and scuffed up (war is not without its costs) and I didn’t dare return it to her sewing box before I had scraped up enough money to buy some sandpaper to remove the scars of combat and some varnish to return it to as good as new. In the meantime, I continued to use the darning egg in its martial capacity. One afternoon as I was walking past a parked dump truck, my imagination suddenly sparked and I flattened myself against the brick wall, lobbed my hand grenade into the back of the tank the duplicitous Nazis had camouflaged as a dump truck, then threw myself on the pavement to avoid the shrapnel, and while I was lying there with my arms over my head, the goddamned tank drove off! Taking my mother’s darning egg with it.