The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

by Trevanian

  We were sitting around our radio, listening to the evening news about the continuing war in the Pacific, when there was a knock on our door. It was Mr Kane. We had a long-distance call. Mother looked at me, her eyes afflicted with fear. “Ohmygod! I told you! I knew something was wrong! Ohmygod!”

  Anne-Marie and I ran with her across to the cornerstore. She reached reluctantly for the dangling earphone as though it were a viper and put her lips as close to the mouthpiece as she dared. “Hello?” she said in a frangible voice. Anne-Marie turned away, not wanting to see Mother’s expression when she heard what Anne-Marie felt sure would be something terrible, and she stood staring out through the front door of the shop, chewing on a strand of hair. “Yes?” Mother said. Then, after listening for a time she asked, “When?” Anne-Marie looked at me, her eyes brimming. The person on the other end of the line did most of the talking, with Mother saying only ‘I understand’ and ‘Yes, I see’. So frustrated was Mrs Kane in her effort to construct the details of our tragedy from these scanty fragments that she gave up can-counting and leaned on the counter, frankly examining Mother’s face for clues. Finally Mother said, ‘When will that be?......No idea at all?......I see......Yes, I see......All right......” There was sufficient ambiguity in this for Anne-Marie to lift her eyebrows at me with a tentative maybe-everything’s-all-right-after-all expression. I pushed out my lower lip and shrugged. Then Mother said into the phone, “All right, well, you take care of yourself. Yes, I will. Good-bye. What’s that?” She lowered her voice. “Yes...me too,” and she hung up. When she turned to us she was smiling. “That was—” But she saw Mrs Kane’s gossip-hungry face and she said, “I’ll tell you when we get home.”

  She and Anne-Marie left the shop while I thanked Mr Kane for coming to fetch us.

  “No bad news, I hope?” Mrs Kane asked, desperate to know.

  I looked into her eyes and frowned, as though trying to find the words to explain everything...but then, too full of emotion to speak, I shook my head, turned and left.

  When we got home Mother told us the news. Ben hadn’t been the last man shot in Europe, after all. My eyes suddenly pricked with tears, and I realized that I’d been more worried than I had let myself admit. Ben had been shipped back to Fort Dix, New Jersey, and he had called to say that as soon as his records caught up with him, he would wangle some of his accumulated leave and come up to Albany so he and Mother could get married.

  So things were working out after all. But I didn’t dare count on it. And I found it disquieting to see my feisty, tough-minded mother acting like some bubbly bobby-soxer on her first date. I kept well out of the way the next few evenings while she and Anne-Marie sat together at the kitchen table, babbling about the wedding (...a simple ceremony...no church, of course, because she was a divorced woman...) and about what Mother should wear (...nothing too wedding-ish, just a nice spring suit she could get some use out of afterwards...matching hat and shoes and gloves...not a big hat, just a pillbox with a half veil...). Anne-Marie’s experience as Dressmaker to the Stars was invaluable. And no honeymoon, Mother declared. Period, end of sentence! She didn’t want to leave us children alone, not even for one night. And anyway, she felt that a honeymoon for a second marriage would be sort of...well, funny. After all, second weddings aren’t like first ones. They’re more...well, you know...arrangements, sort of. No, she wouldn’t have a honeymoon. Just a little reception after the wedding—

  “But not here!” Mother said abruptly. “I’m damned if I’m going to return from my wedding to North Pearl Street, Albany, New York. I am not going to be married in a slum and that’s final! Period! End of story!”

  “But...where?” I asked.

  Mother thought for about three seconds, then she pronounced, “I’ll be married from my cousin Lorna’s house.”

  “In Granville?” I asked incredulously. “At Tonio’s?”

  “Lorna can be my matron of honor.”

  “And Tonio? You think Ben wants him as best man?”

  “Tonio doesn’t have to be best man. He can be...a witness. It’s the least they can do, considering that they haven’t lifted a hand to help us all these years.”

  “Yes, but...”

  “I’ll write to Lorna tonight.”

  “But, Mom...”

  “I’ve made up my mind! A woman should be married in the bosom of her family. Maybe that’s what went wrong with my first marriage. Papa didn’t like Ray, so we snuck off and got married in Connecticut where we didn’t have to wait for blood tests. The whole ceremony took about ten minutes. No family, no friends to wish us well. And look how that turned out. No, I want to be married from my cousin’s house, and that’s that!”

  “...period, end of sentence,” I added under my breath. “End of paragraph, end of chapter, end of story, end of...”

  The week sped by in breathless planning and anticipation. Gab sessions between Mother and Anne-Marie continued late into the night in their shared bedroom, where they talked from one bed to the other, making and refining plans for the wedding, and for what we would do after the war: the tourist cabins and the cafe with its red-checkered tablecloths, Anne-Marie’s dance career, my becoming one of Wyoming’s leading doctors. Lying on my bed out in the living room, I read to the background murmur of their voices rising and falling, muttering and fluttering, as they lay in Mother’s bed side by side, sketching our golden future on the common darkness above them.

  Mother wrote to her cousin Lorna and received a return letter full of underlinings and exclamation points. Lorna would love to have her and Ben married from their home! Ever since their visit to Albany Lorna had been hoping and praying that something might come up that would give them a chance to make up and become close again, like they used to be back when they were young girls sweeping all the dancing cups. Remember? We were a great team! Knocked their socks off!

  Mother didn’t seem to notice that her cousin made no mention of Uncle Tonio, so I didn’t bring him up.

  One manifestation of the hopeful climate of those weeks was the especially long song sessions that began when Anne-Marie and I were doing the supper dishes and sometimes extended for hours, the three of us sitting around the kitchen table, playing ‘Name That Tune’ and challenging one another on the hits of the last year of the war.66

  Late one night in mid-July, a sleep-rumpled Mr Kane came knocking at our door. We had a telephone call. Mother rushed across the street wearing pajamas under her old terry-cloth robe. It was Ben calling from New Jersey. He had received two months’ back pay and two weeks of leave before he had to report to San Francisco for new duties. He wanted them to get married as soon as they had their obligatory blood tests. Not only that, but shortly later we would all be going across the United States to California! Two days after the Germans surrendered, Ben received orders transferring him to a communications training center in California. He had worked out all the details of our trip, which, as his legal family, the army would pay for. He would go first to find a place for us to live, then we would follow with such possessions as we were allowed to bring—not much, he was afraid, considering the spatial limitations on wartime trains. As Mother was sharing this news with Anne-Marie and me, I wondered how Ben had reacted to hearing that the marriage would take place at Lorna and Tonio’s house in Granville, but I didn’t ask because I had a feeling she hadn’t told him yet.

  Anne-Marie and I had trouble getting to sleep that night, she because of the excitement of California, Movieland, and I because despite my natural tendency to gloom-seek, it was beginning to look as though our ship had come in after all. Still, I didn’t let myself believe this completely, lest spiteful Fate catch me hoping and decide at the last minute to scuttle it at the dockside.

  Ben arrived the next morning, having hitchhiked to Albany through the night. After the first crush of hugs and kisses with everyone talking at the same time, he settled into his place at the table, an
d the kitchen seemed full of him because he had been gone so long that we had become used to just ourselves around the little table. While Mother and Anne-Marie were plying him with eager questions, I noticed that his hands trembled slightly and that he was thinner and...I guess ‘friable’ is the closest word. He had seen action in Africa and on the beach in Sicily; he had been wounded twice; he had known the fear of death. These things had aged him, robbed him of his sense of immortality.

  Later that night, after Anne-Marie and I were in our beds, I overheard a taut exchange out in the kitchen when Mother revealed that they were going to be married in her cousin Lorna’s house. Ben called it Tonio’s house, and asked why he hadn’t been consulted. I couldn’t catch the words of Mother’s response, but her voice was captious and exasperated, and shortly after, without a pause at the door for a kiss, Ben left the apartment and went up to sleep in the top-floor room that used to be his, and that Mother had rented again for the time he would be with us. (She’d be damned if she’d give the block’s busybodies something to gossip about!) The feeling at the breakfast table the next morning was that spiky politeness that makes children tighten their neck muscles and try to become smaller, but the tension slowly dissolved during the week-long flurry of planning and list-making during which Ben and Mother went downtown to get their blood tests, and to buy a new suit for him, because he was sick of the army and didn’t want to be married in uniform. But when they came back, they brought their bristly tension with them. After a brief but sharp contest of wills Ben had chosen a blue double-breasted suit, an apple-green shirt, a striped tie and two-toned black and white shoes with perforated toe caps. On their way back from shopping, they had stopped off at a restaurant where my mother had done occasional stand-in work, perhaps because Mother wanted to show off her returning hero. While there, Ben did something that embarrassed her, dunked a doughnut or something like that, and Mother said something about people who were born in a barn. Their recent scrape over his taste in clothes still raw, he slapped some money down on the table and walked out of the restaurant, leaving her to explain his behavior to her former co-workers. Walking out on my mother was the very worst thing for him to have done. It was a gesture laden with ominous symbolism.

  There were other hints that Mother’s habit of controlling everything (for Ben’s own good, of course) was meeting resistance. He was no longer the easy-riding, half-joshing cowboy who didn’t mind being trained and shaped. And there was something else, something that came to the surface only rarely and briefly. We would be sitting around the kitchen table, all jabbering, and I would glance up to find that he had slipped into what I can best describe as a sudden silence of the soul. An instant later, he would be back, joking and planning and telling yarns. It was as though something had gone slack inside him, before tightening up again. These were passing moments, and I assumed that time would heal him. A more permanent change was that he had lost his taste for the absurd. Something brought us around to talking about the Olympic games, which had been discontinued for the duration of the war, and Mother had said that if long-distance canal skating were an Olympic sport, she would enter and win all the medals. My sense of the absurd prompted me to suggest that she and I enter as a team in the sheet-wringing-out competition, and that induced the image of domestic activities as Olympic sports. I suggested high-speed knitting with its concomitant danger of what champion knitters called skein-burn from the wool rushing so fast between the fingers that it smoked, and there would be a special category for the truly adept, one-handed knitting...with style points. Then I described the super-heavy-weight division of Free Style Knitting in which vaulting poles were used as knitting needles and docking hawser for wool. I glanced over at Ben, expecting him to step in and carry us yet further into the absurd, but there was annoyed confusion in his eyes, as though he were trying to figure out what the hell I was talking about, and that disturbed me even more than his sudden silences of the soul had. The war had changed Ben in subtle but profound ways that Mother didn’t seem to notice.

  I went to Anne-Marie’s last dancing class. When it was over, Mother told Miss LaMonte about our plans to move to California, and asked if she knew any good dance teachers out there so Anne-Marie could continue to prepare for discovery. Pushing a handkerchief down between her breasts to soak up perspiration, the glistening Miss LaMonte said that she didn’t know any personally, but she assumed that we might find one or two adequate teachers, although we couldn’t expect them to have the professional New York legitimate stage training that had made her studio what it was today. As Anne-Marie was putting her leotards into her carrying bag for the last time, Miss LaMonte’s mother turned in her bentwood chair before the old upright piano, peeled the ubiquitous cigarette off her lower lip and, after a short but impressive bout of moist coughing, told Mother between reedy gasps that Anne-Marie would do just fine in California because she had plenty of moxie, and if there was one thing you needed to be a success out in California it was moxie.

  One evening while Mother and Anne-Marie were planning the last details of the wedding, Ben and I took a walk around our neighborhood. As we threaded through the narrower back streets, he told me about some of the funny and frustrating things that had happened to him in the army, but nothing about combat or his wounds. When I asked about these, he either changed the subject or slipped into silence, but when I asked what war was like, he described it as months of discomfort and boredom broken by a few minutes of panic and rage, and if your panic and rage made you do certain things, you were called a hero, but if it made you do other things you were called a coward, and that’s how it was. He said that from what he had seen, war was just one massive screw-up. The victors didn’t really win, they just lost more slowly than their enemy, or had enough stockpiled materiel to go on losing longer. We were comfortable enough with each other to be able to walk in silence for longish periods, each browsing on his own thoughts. I wanted to tell him that I could see how much the war had changed him, and that he should do what he really wanted to do, and not feel obliged to marry my mother because of us kids. I selfishly yearned to hear him say that taking care of my mother was what he wanted more than anything in this world. I wanted to escape both responsibility for my mother’s future happiness, and any guilt about Ben’s future unhappiness. While I was trying to find the words to express this, he broke the silence to ask how I was getting along with my slide rule, and I confessed that I’d been slack about keeping in practice, like he told me I had to, but I had taught myself to read French...pretty much. The next thing I knew we were approaching our stoop, and I hadn’t offered Ben an easy way out of any guilt he might harbor about wanting to leave Mother and us kids. I didn’t then admit, even to myself, that I was glad I hadn’t given him a chance to liberate himself, for fear he might take it.

  The next day Ben withdrew his savings from the bank, and the four of us went down to the echoing, brake-squealing, gas-smelling Central Terminal and boarded a bus for Granville. Mother had strongly advised him to leave most of the money in the bank, but he said that he had never had that much folding money in his pocket before, and what’s the point of having money if you can’t get a kick out of it? But that explanation wasn’t sufficient to keep Mother from returning to the matter and gnawing on it, as was her habit. She always believed that her advice was ignored only by those who hadn’t quite understood it.67 During the long trip up to Granville we kids sat in the front seats just behind the driver because Mother thought that might assuage Anne-Marie’s tendency to motion sickness.

  It didn’t, and this was before buses had on-board toilets, so the driver had to pull over three times to let her vomit by the side of the road while, to Anne-Marie’s humiliation, the passengers looked on, their eyes flinching away then back again with that blend of revulsion and fascination people feel towards freshly squashed roadkill. Mother and Ben sat just behind us, and I heard her mention the excess cash Ben was carrying at least half a dozen times. His responses prog
ressed from passing it off with lighthearted joshing, to a flat statement that he didn’t want to talk about this any more, to prickly silence that I could feel through the dust-smelling velveteen seat after she said that flashing a big wad of money was nothing but acting like your typical hick.

  I scrunched down in my seat and wished I had the power to render my mother mute for just a little while. I tried closing my eyes and focusing all my concentration on the task. It didn’t work.

  When the bus stopped on Granville’s main street, we were met by a nervous, apologetic Aunt Lorna, who had come alone because she wanted a chance to tell Mother that Tonio had made some changes in the arrangements...just a few. Speaking quickly to explain everything before Mother could interrupt, Lorna began by saying she hoped Mother wouldn’t get mad and blame her, because it wasn’t her fault; she had so much wanted things to go just right, especially when her favorite cousin and best friend in this whole wide world would soon go away to California and God only knew when—or if—they’d ever meet again, and it would be a crying shame to let little things ruin what might be the last time they ever spent together, especially considering the bad blood there had been between them, not that she was blaming Mother for that, but...