The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

by Trevanian

  That very night—wouldn’t you know it?—she suggested that we play One Hundred Dollars! while she did her darning. I was unable to deflect her to pinochle, so I sat there, drawing up my list with a frown of total concentration as she pawed around in the bottom of her sewing basket with growing irritation, muttering that she couldn’t seem to find her darning egg. “H’m,” I hummed, with a ‘How-about-that?’ inflection. She asked if I had seen it. Asked me. Not Anne-Marie, no, only me. As though everything was always my fault. I didn’t lie to her. I almost never lied to my mother, but I was adept at the misleading non-lie. When she asked if I had done something with her darning egg I said, “Me?” (Just a matter of clarification, not a lie.) Then I sighed, put my list of purchases aside, and said, “All right, all right, I’ll help you find it!” And I went around the house, looking under beds and in drawers, from which actions my mother may perhaps have drawn the conclusion that I hadn’t taken it, but I never actually lied to her. Indeed, I gave her reason to be proud of my ingenuity when I unscrewed the lightbulb from a lamp and told her to try using that until her darning egg showed up. It worked perfectly, and for the rest of her life, my mother darned with a burnt-out lightbulb, although she would occasionally raise her eyes from her work and wonder what on earth ever became of her mother’s hickory darning egg.

  • • • • • • • • •

  That June, a few days after the school year staggered to its dreary end, I became thirteen years old. A teenager? Me, who had always scorned the mooning, mawkish ways of teenagers like radio’s chicken-voiced Henry Aldrich? Me, a teenager! But wait, I didn’t want to be a teenager. I wasn’t through being a kid, yet.

  Later that summer, the Allies landed in Sicily, and we all worried about Ben when, once again, the flow of his letters stopped for nearly three weeks. Then we got a V-mail from a hospital in Palermo. The letter was short, and Ben’s handwriting was shaky, but he made a joke about how he seemed always to be standing just where some bullet hankered to be. For all the jocular tone, Mother felt sure that this new wound was more serious than the one he got in North Africa, and she was tense and edgy for a couple of weeks, until she received a letter in which Ben said he was out of the hospital and loafing around in a recuperation center. Oh, and he’d received his second Purple Heart, along with an increase in rank to technical sergeant. “If this war goes on long enough, I’ll end up a general!” Mother talked about changing the service banner in our window from a blue star to a silver one in recognition of Ben’s wounds, but she never got around to it. At the time I thought her indifference had something to do with a long letter that came a few days later in which Ben confessed that he was no longer a technical sergeant. He had been broken back to private. Along with some buddies at the recuperation center, he had gone into town to celebrate with a couple of beers...only a couple, honest...but the next day he passed a lieutenant without saluting, and when the newly commissioned shavetail rebuked him, Ben unleashed a spate of abuse and rage that he didn’t realize had built up within him. Mother had been proud of the way Ben had risen so quickly through the ranks and she was vexed to have to write ‘Private’ on her V-mail letters.

  Ben’s loss of rank didn’t matter a bit to me, but I sensed ominous potential in his strange, self-destructive kind of alcoholism.

  • • • • • • • • •

  My mother and I were playing honeymoon pinochle at the kitchen table. She and Anne-Marie had gone to bed a couple of hours earlier, and I was reading in my daybed when she came padding in and asked if I was ready to face the licking I had coming to me for winning our last game...by pure, blind luck! Our habitual challenge routine involved this sort of lippy banter, but I could hardly tell her that I’d rather stay in my cozy bed with my book because I felt she wanted to get something off her chest. “Any time you feel lucky, Mother o’ mine,” I said, climbing out of bed and draping the Hudson Bay over my shoulders. “But I warn you that you’re in for another humiliation.”

  “That’ll be a hot day in hell,” she said.

  I sighed, but let it go.

  Partway through the first hand, she mentioned offhandedly that her divorce had come through.

  “Really? When?”

  “A couple of weeks ago.”

  “A couple of weeks? But...why didn’t you say something?”

  She shrugged. No other answer.

  “Well anyway,” I said, “that’s great news!” For the past six months, I had been haunted by fantasies of coming home after school and finding my father sitting at the kitchen table, swigging down green soda and smiling slyly because he knew that we wouldn’t be able to divorce him for abandoning us...not for another seven years at least. I considered killing him and hiding the body somewhere. How to hide him was an engrossing problem, and I occupied some of the boring time in class working up inventive solutions, like drying him out like a mummy then dressing him in Indian clothes and putting him in the glass-case diorama of Iroquois life in the Natural History Museum. “So, you and Ben are free to get married whenever you like.”

  “Except that he’s on the other side of the ocean, fighting this damned war.”

  My trouble-hunting imagination instantly shifted from my father showing up to ruin the divorce to the possibility that Ben might not come back, having been killed in battle, or become infatuated with some foreign woman, or hit on the head by a falling roof tile and wandering around Europe, a victim of the amnesia: a plot gimmick that was making the rounds of the soap operas at that time.

  I was counting up points when she spoke as though giving voice to a thought she had begun in silence, “...it gave me a funny feeling, seeing that word written down in black and white: ‘Desertion’. That’s what it said under ‘plaintiff’s grounds for seeking divorce’. Desertion seems such a...I don’t know...such a cruel way to say it. I mean, Ray didn’t really ‘desert’ us.”

  “Oh no? What would you call it?”

  “Well, he...I don’t know. He can’t stay put. It just isn’t in his nature.”

  “H’m.”

  “I somehow can’t get used to the idea that I’m a divorced woman. I can’t believe I’m no longer married to your father. He was the first man I ever...” She shrugged and shook her head.

  The game wasn’t over, but I didn’t shuffle because she obviously wasn’t interested in playing.

  “All the time I was waiting for the divorce to become final...all those months...I had this funny feeling that any minute Ray would open the door and toss his hat in like he used to do. He’d wait to see if I was going to throw his hat back at him, and if it didn’t come sailing back out, he’d come in with that crooked grin of his and...He was a charmer, your father. Oh, sure, he’s no good and irresponsible and all that, but he was a charmer. You’ve got to give him that. And a woman was proud to be seen on his arm. Great dresser. Smooth talker.”

  “He’s a con man, Mom.”

  “He never thought of himself as a con man.”

  “What did he think he was?”

  “A dream-merchant.” She smiled to herself and repeated, “That’s what he told me one night. A dream-merchant. He didn’t con people, he sold them dreams.” She compressed her lips and shook her head. “I guess there’s no love like your first love.”

  “And what about Ben?”

  “Oh, I love Ben. I really do. But...in a different way.”

  “What if Ray were to come through that door right now? What would you do?”

  She looked at me for a long moment. Then lifted her shoulders.

  “Mom, you’re not marrying Ben just because of Anne-Marie and me, are you?”

  “No! What an idea! Definitely not.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She nodded, then was silent.

  “Have you written telling Ben that your final papers came through?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why
not?”

  “No special reason. Come on. Deal, why don’t you.”

  “Because it’s your deal.”

  As I picked up my cards (one of the secret ‘edges’ I gave my mother so she could win now and then was not to arrange the cards in my hand; I would just hold them in the order in which I had picked them up), I wondered what Mother would do if my father did come back into our lives, even now, after the divorce had been granted. I had an instinct that it would be something foolish. And I wondered what Ben would do. He was younger than Mother, so I wondered if maybe he was seeking a mother to make up for having been raised in an orphanage. If he was, he was making a big mistake. Even I was more her pal and burden-sharer than her child, and I’d been born to her.

  For some time after she went back to bed, I sat looking out at the street and wondering if she and Ben had any chance of being happy together. It was like one of those questions the soap opera announcers used to pose in their richest, fruitiest voices...Can a deserted woman trying to bring up two children in a slum find happiness as the wife of a younger man who is neither a great dresser nor a smooth talker, and who does himself harm every time he takes a couple of drinks? Tune in next week.

  • • • • • • • • •

  We emptied the Dream Bank to put together a Christmas package for Ben containing things he wouldn’t be able to find overseas. He once told us that he loved pickled pig’s feet (you can imagine how that made Anne-Marie shudder), so we looked all over town, but the only ones we found came in glass jars, and we knew from disastrous experience that no matter how carefully it was packed and padded, a glass jar wouldn’t survive the rough handling of APO mail. We managed to find a can of the corn syrup that Ben preferred to maple syrup, which Anne-Marie and I thought was really strange. Maybe it had to do with his being born in Missouri, while we were Northeasterners. And we sent him a box of Bull Durham in those little sacks with yellow drawstrings because, although the tobacco industry provided servicemen with ‘free’ (meaning government-subsidized) cigarettes that would assure the cigarette company thousands of new addicted customers when the war was over, Ben couldn’t get the roll-your-own ‘makings’ he preferred. In a used-book shop I found a collection of Western stories written before the turn of the century by Owen Wister and illustrated by Frederic Remington.60 But what he probably appreciated most was a special year-end songbook that contained all the hits of 1943.61 Before putting it into the box, Anne-Marie, Mother and I sang our way through it, and the sentimental ones dampened Mother’s eyes.

  On her way back from mailing off Ben’s Christmas package, my mother stopped off at Kane’s cornerstore and when she got home there was a small tin of cinnamon among her groceries and an extra loaf of day-old bread. She almost never bought spices other than salt and pepper because they were expensive and not essential to a healthful diet, but this cinnamon had caught her eye and reminded her of winter nights during her childhood when she and her sisters used to sneak down from their shared bedroom to make cinnamon toast as a forbidden late-night feast, so she bought some for Anne-Marie and me, and to hell with the cost! For the next few weeks, through the heavy snows of Christmas and New Year’s and well into the leaden cold of February, she made cinnamon toast for the three of us each night before bed. She would spread toast with margarine and sprinkle a mixture of sugar and cinnamon over it, then put it back under the gas grill (we didn’t have a toaster as such) until the sugar and margarine bubbled and formed a candied crust. I relished the feeling in my mouth of slippery melted margarine between the crusty cinnamon sugar and the crisp toast. The little tin of cinnamon ran out, and we didn’t squander money on a second one, but it was a splendid treat while it lasted.

  • • • • • • • • •

  I occasionally saw Mrs McGivney scuttling over to Mr Kane’s, as timid and furtive as ever. She always seemed slightly baffled, as though her mind were sort of...‘windblown’ is the most accurate word I can think of. Her old-fashioned dresses were often misbuttoned, and wisps of hair escaped from the amber combs she used to keep it in place. I tried to speak to her a couple of times, just a friendly word to cheer her up, but her eyes would graze mine with a wincing glance and she’d scurry away, leaving behind that faintly cheddar smell of old women. I was sorry that I hadn’t gone to see her after Mr McGivney died. It wouldn’t have hurt me to sit up there for half an hour or so every once in a while, eating a sugar cookie and listening to her tell me how much all the other soldiers had liked her husband when he was down in Cuba. Maybe if she had someone to talk to once in a while she wouldn’t have become so...windblown. But remembering that she now sat in her husband’s straight-backed chair, looking out over the back alley through her lace curtains, just like he used to, sent shivers up my spine, so I always put off going to visit her.

  When I stepped out onto our stoop one Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1943, I immediately knew something was afoot. There was that faint but legible spoor of trouble that street people can sense...like when the police are in the neighborhood, or there is violence in the wind. Sometimes it’s not signs you read, but the absence of signs, like an unaccountable silence, or kids who should be playing, but are not. Word had spread through the block, and all the gossips had found reason to be out on their stoops. One woman came out with a broom as though to sweep the steps, and a moment later Mrs Hanrahan appeared, also carrying a broom and obviously piqued that this busybody had not only copied her excuse for being on her stoop, but had had the cheek to copy it first. Some people! Kids abandoned their games and clustered in silent twos or threes against the walls between stoops, itchily impatient to return to play but cowed by the spreading aura of anticipation. Two little girls clung to the metal railing around a sunken basement and swung back and forth, hanging straight-elbowed from their stretched arms, covetously eyeing a freshly chalked hopscotch pattern, their young bodies hungry for activity, but hindered by the gravity of the moment. A white car with something written on its door was parked down the street outside Mrs McGivney’s building. Women chatted desultorily as though unaware of the chilling portents, but their corner-of-the-eye attention never left Mrs McGivney’s front door. I walked over to the next stoop and asked, “What’s happening?” of a woman who had decided to darn her kids’ socks in the good daylight of her stoop.

  “They’re taking her away, poor thing,” she whispered, tipping her head towards Mrs McGivney’s, but not looking that way because she didn’t want to be thought of as some kind of snoop.

  “Taking who away?”

  “Men in white. From the nuthouse. They’re up there with a nurse.”

  I crossed the street to Mr Kane’s cornerstore, and he told me that Mrs McGivney had been getting more and more vague over the last few weeks, and he got worried when she didn’t come to do her shopping for a week, so he made an anonymous call to the Social Services people, asking them to look in on her. One of the young social workers had come. (You could recognize them by their eager faces and the enameled smiles they bestowed on children, while their bodies stiffened in dread of physical contact.) The social worker had gone up to Mrs McGivney’s apartment, only to reappear on the stoop a few minutes later and look up and down the street until she spotted the white enameled metal plaque with its dark blue bell that announced the presence of a Bell pay telephone in Mr. Kane’s store. She crossed and placed her call, speaking quickly and quietly with her lips close to the mouthpiece (which she had first wiped with her handkerchief), then she left. Half an hour later, the white car arrived.

  I went back out into the street where the curiosity was so intense you could taste it, like ozone before a thunderstorm, but despite their curiosity, no one was sitting on the stoops on either side of Mrs McGivney’s building where they could have had a good view of the show. And I knew why. An article of folk-dogma of North Pearl was that it was dangerous to get too close to ‘people from Poughkeepsie’. Those funny-farm goons might just grab you,
too, while they were at it. Save themselves a trip! I decided to cross over and sit on Mrs McGivney’s stoop. Maybe when they brought her down she wouldn’t feel so frightened if there was someone she knew close at hand, someone who would smile at her and say a pleasant word, maybe touch her hand.

  The front door opened and they came down, first a nurse and a young orderly, then an older, chubby orderly who had Mrs McGivney’s elbow cupped in his palm in a gallant, protective way as he walked slowly beside her, leaning close as though eager not to miss a word of what she was telling him. I scooted over to let them pass me, and Mrs McGivney’s urine-smelling dress brushed my shoulder. She wasn’t even aware that I was there as she animatedly explained to the orderly, “...then his commanding officer—Captain Francis Murphy?—well, he wrote to say that Private McGivney had been a cheerful and willing soldier and that he was well liked by everybody in the regiment. Everybody in the whole regiment!”

  “Gosh, imagine that,” the orderly said, helping her into the official car. “Liked by everybody in the regiment, was he? I’ll be darned.”

  They drove away, and we never saw Mrs McGivney again.

  • • • • • • • • •

  Wool-gathering and dozing in the classroom must have supplied some of my need for sleep and dreaming, because I seldom got more than five hours of normal sleep. It was always after midnight when I gave up looking out on the empty street where misty light fell from the widely spaced streetlamps, leaving patches of dense shadow between. Someone walking down the street late at night would emerge out of the darkness, his shadow dim and long behind him. As he approached the lamp post, his shadow would shorten, then as he passed under the streetlight, it would swing beneath him and lead him out of the pool of light, lengthening until both man and shadow were absorbed into the next slab of shadow.