The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

by Trevanian

  There wasn’t a word spoken during our long, three-stage bus ride back to Albany. Ben’s new suit was ruined. Humiliated and hung over, he avoided looking at us. He stared out his window, his eyes raw and whipped. Mother sat beside him, seething in silence; Anne-Marie and I sat in the seat across the aisle, neither of us daring to talk.

  Twice Anne-Marie got sick and the bus had to stop along the road; finally she fell asleep against my shoulder.

  Night fell, and I carefully eased out of my seat, lowered Anne-Marie’s head so she could sleep across both seats, and went to the front of the bus, where I occupied a recently vacated seat directly behind the driver. I stared out the front window as our headlights cleaved an eternal archway of overhanging branches that vanished into the darkness at the edges of the cone of light we chased down the road. In time, the hypnotic drone of the engine and the rigidity of my stare made it feel as though we were standing still and the trees were rushing at us, then parting and pouring past us right and left. It was all my fault. I had sensed from the beginning that things wouldn’t work out between Ben and Mother. They were both good people, but Mother wasn’t the easygoing, forgiving, optimistic woman Ben needed; and Ben wasn’t what she wanted him to be: a responsible, reliable version of my slick-talking, sharp-dressing father, to whom she still had an aggrieved but undying attachment. I had sensed all this, but nevertheless I had done nothing to save them from each other. I could have, easily. All I would have had to do was tell my mother that I didn’t want Ben for a stepfather, and that would have been the end of it. Her loyalty to her children sprang from a deeper place than her feelings for Ben, or for any man. But in the end, I had saved myself instead. I wasn’t exactly responsible for Mother and Ben’s marriage, but I could have stopped it.

  I was responsible, however, for Ben’s losing money to those card-shark friends of Tonio. Tonio had told me how these vermin worked, and I’d had a premonition of calamity when I walked past the dining room door and saw the cards and the wine on the table, but I hadn’t warned him. So whatever happened now would be my fault. I knew that the guilt would be with me forever. At the moment of accepting that guilt I experienced one of those metaphor-moments that emerge again and again in my nightmares: it is night, and I am being chased through a tunnel of harshly lit tree limbs that rush towards my face, then split and rush right and left, into oblivion at the edge of the headlights, and this chase, this flight, goes on forever, forever.

  It was after midnight when we arrived at our stoop on Pearl Street, Anne-Marie sleep-walking between me and Ben. Without a word, Ben and Mother took bedding from Anne-Marie’s bed and put it on the floor beside my daybed. Anne-Marie wriggled in, having emerged only minimally from unconsciousness and eager to escape back into sleep. In no time her breathing was shallow and regular. I could hear the rustling sounds of Mother and Ben undressing in the back bedroom, then the creak of the springs as they got into bed. Ben’s voice muttered good-night and something else I couldn’t catch. Mother was silent. I sat on the edge of my bed, looking out on the street and feeling miserable. When I closed my eyes I could see those pallid branches rush past me as I hurtled into the darkness. I opened my eyes to dispel the vertigo.

  After a long silence, I heard Mother’s voice. Ben replied. Then Mother said something curt and sharp. I couldn’t make out their words, but there was anger and pain in the sound. It wasn’t long before they raised their voices and I overheard swatches of their hurtful quarrel.

  “...All right!” Ben said. “I got drunk! I’m sorry. I keep saying I’m sorry! What more can I do?”

  “You got stinking drunk on your wedding night and left your wife to sleep with her kids!”

  A silence, and I hoped they would stop fighting and let sleep and time start to heal things.

  But Mother couldn’t let it go. “I can’t believe it,” she persisted. “How could you throw away the money we worked so hard to save?”

  “I think they put something in the drinks.”

  “Oh, my eye! You just can’t hold your liquor. And I told you not to bring all that money with you. But no! You had to show off. The big spender from the sticks in his two-tone shoes! You should’ve known better than to gamble with strangers.”

  “But it was your family!”

  “Oh, so now it’s all my fault!”

  “I didn’t say that; I just— Look, I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Well, I do want to talk about it!”

  “Not tonight.”

  “Yes, tonight!”

  “I’m trying to forget that it was your cousin and her husband that stole my money.”

  “A sucker is a sucker. If Tonio hadn’t cleaned you out, the next sharper down the pike would have!”

  “Honey, listen to me. I don’t want to talk about this any more. You hear what I’m saying to you?”

  “Is that a threat? Because if you think you can threaten me, you can think again.”

  Ben didn’t answer. The silence that followed was so long that I had almost fallen asleep when I heard my mother mutter something about Ben being a rube and an easy mark who lacked the street savvy and the polish of her first husband.

  “Savvy? Polish? You’re talking about a guy who dumped you and the kids into this stink hole and ran off. That’s savvy and polish?”

  “Well, at least he wasn’t dumb enough to let himself be taken by a couple of small-time card sharks!” Ben said nothing, and I tried by force of concentration to will my mother to let it drop and not make things worse. But after a short simmering silence she continued, like a kid who can’t stop picking at a scab, “...and he knew how to talk to people...how to wear clothes...how to impress—”

  “Honey...we’d better not talk about this any more.”

  “I’ll talk about what I damn well like!”

  “You may end up talking to yourself.”

  “You’re saying you’re going to walk out on me? Is that it?”

  Silence from Ben.

  “I haven’t forgotten how you walked out on me in that restaurant, and don’t you think I have. You’re no better than the last one!”

  I silently begged Mother to stop talking. Just stop talking! And for God’s sake, don’t say ‘the last one’!

  “Well,” she continued, “nobody’s keeping you here against your will. You can pack your bag and take off any time you want to, and good luck to you.”

  “I don’t intend to...Listen, honey. We’re just too het up to talk about this tonight. Maybe tomorrow—”

  “If there is a tomorrow!”

  A long silence, then Ben said, “Good-night, honey.”

  “Don’t ‘honey’ me!”

  Shut up, Mom. Shut up!

  I couldn’t believe that my mother could possibly prefer Ray to Ben. Ben was an honest, hardworking, compassionate man. How could my mother prefer the irresponsible hustler who had dumped us onto Pearl Street? I couldn’t believe it. I fell asleep that night with the conviction that love was not only blind but stupid as well. And all night long I hurtled down the tunnel of harshly lit branches.

  The next morning Ben had to catch the train for his new posting in California. He and Mother went down to Union Station while Anne-Marie and I stayed home. After sitting at the kitchen table for a long time, picking at the oilcloth with her fingernail, Anne-Marie asked me what I thought about Mother and Ben’s fight last night. While I thought she was sleeping, she had been listening from her bed on the floor beside my daybed, breathing deeply and evenly in an effort to calm her fears. Did I still think things would work out? Were we going to be happy in California? Or would Mother and Ben get a divorce, and we’d end up staying on North Pearl Street for the rest of our lives? I admitted that I didn’t know, but if anything bad happened, it wouldn’t be Ben’s fault. And not our mother’s either, really. It was Ray’s fault. He had hurt Mother...embittered her.

 
“Yes, but you think things will work out all right, don’t you?” Anne-Marie asked again, unwilling to accept a disappointing answer.

  I took a long breath and said, “Sure. They just need to get used to each other. Things will work out. You’ll see.” In my heart I was sure they were doomed.

  But when Mother returned from seeing Ben off, she was her old self, smiling and cheerful. Miraculously, they had kissed and made up. Everything was fine! They had spent the last half hour before his train pulled out sitting in the railroad cafeteria, making plans for the tourist cabins in Wyoming. They had decided that if they started off with just three cabins, they could still manage on what was left of the money.

  My knees almost buckled with relief. Adults!

  I was less relieved, however, when I asked Mother if she had apologized to Ben for being so hard on him, and she told me, “No, he did the apologizing.”

  “All of it?”

  “Sure. After all, it wasn’t me that lost the money.”

  I wondered how long that could last: two people doing the misbehaving, but only one doing the apologizing.

  Mother reached into her handbag and produced the tickets she had picked up at the train station for our trip to California in just two weeks. There were three booklets of them, one for each of us. I asked if I could keep mine, and she let me. But now there were a thousand things to do: deciding what to bring and what to leave, gathering cardboard boxes, packing, cleaning the apartment, giving notice to the rent collector. Mother couldn’t wait to shake the dust of North Pearl Street off her shoes.

  To avoid getting rushed and flustered if we left things too late, we started packing that very day, only to discover by evening that we had packed away some things that we needed for daily life. But we couldn’t remember which box they were in and we had to undo half our packing in the search, so Mother said we’d better quit and start again in the morning, after a good night’s sleep. And this time we would list the contents of each box on the outside! It rained that night, and I sat looking out at wet cobblestones varnished by light from the streetlamp across the way. I took my booklet of tickets out of their envelope and examined them reverently. Strips of paper that stood for distant places. Albany–Buffalo, Buffalo–Chicago, Chicago–Salt Lake City, Salt Lake City–San Francisco...you could almost hear the sing-song cry of the conductor calling out destinations on the radio drama series Grand Central Station.

  I let the leaves of my ticket flutter through my fingers like the pages of my riffle books. I could hardly believe it. I was leaving North Pearl Street, at last!

  • • • • • • • • •

  As dependents of an enlisted man, we were allowed to take only one suitcase each in our passenger car and three medium-sized cardboard boxes in the baggage car, a fraction of the space that officers’ dependents were given. This meant that we had to discard or give away almost all of our possessions. We packed and repacked, trying to fit as much in as possible. Birth and marriage certificates had first priority, followed by Mother’s three photograph albums...her memories, most of them captured by the old accordion-bellows Kodak that had passed from her father to her, recording both her childhood and ours. There wasn’t even space for our precious ‘five-tail’ Hudson Bay blankets. Using a big chunk of the travel money Ben sent us, we packed the Hudson Bays in mothballs and shipped them separately by Railroad Express, but either they got nicked along the line or they simply fell victim to the chaotic state of the railroads at the end of the war, because we never saw them again.

  Mother let Anne-Marie and me each pick one unnecessary thing to bring to California. We made our choices, changed our minds, then changed them back again, suffering not only the torment of leaving desirable things behind but, in Anne-Marie’s case, the shame of abandoning dolls and stuffed animals that she had loved and to which she ascribed reciprocal feelings. And yet, at the last minute, she snatched her ‘magic skin’ doll out of her suitcase and replaced it with the collection of the paper-doll fashions that she had made from brown paper bags: her life’s work in the service of fashion...her portfolio, you might say. And in the end I forsook my copy of High School Subjects Self-Taught and brought instead my slowly amassed collection of riffle books.

  Mother tried to find a safe way to pack Ben’s most treasured possession, his fragile melon mandolin. She looked into having it specially boxed and shipped by Railroad Express, but the cost was prohibitive. Her dilemma was solved one evening when we were trying to organize our choices by dragging the ‘bring’ boxes to one end of the room and the ‘leave’ boxes to the other, with an ‘I’m not sure’ box in the middle. She stepped back to consider which box something should go into, and she tripped over the mandolin, crushing it beyond repair. I refuse to ponder the symbolism of that Freudian trip over Ben’s mandolin.

  When it became clear that we would have to leave our Emerson behind, I felt particularly traitorous. Not only had that radio brought us much of our laughter and most of our entertainment, music, information and news, but it had exercised my imagination, broadened my experience, populated my fantasies. The entire Second World War had been fought inside that radio, among those glowing tubes. Mother decided to give the radio and everything else we couldn’t bring with us to Mrs Meehan, who had lost so much in her life that she could no longer let go of things. I was consoled to think that our Emerson would continue bringing its laughter and magic to North Pearl, even if only to the half-wit Meehans.

  I kept both paper routes right up to the end because we needed the money, so each morning at four-thirty I was dragged out of those precious last moments of deep, viscous sleep by the slack clatter of our alarm clock. I dressed numbly and staggered into the kitchen to eat oatmeal before stomping up the Lexington Avenue hill to pick up my papers. Upon returning to Pearl Street I helped with the packing and cleaning. There seemed to be an endless list of last-minute errands to do, each of which had to be accomplished before anything else could be decided on, and we were harried by anxiety because the number of days left before departure was dwindling relentlessly. To make things worse, the city was sweltering beneath a terrible heat wave that sapped our strength, shortened our tempers and made working inside our apartment a torment. My skin crawled with prickly heat despite the cold soaks we took in our cast-iron bathtub.

  The night after my last collection, I sat at my bedside table, staring into space, too keyed up to sleep, too worn out to work. I was trying to draw up a list of things that remained to be done, when I became aware of an agreeable humming in my ears, and everything felt soft and strange. I was no longer tired; on the contrary, I felt buoyant. But I knew that I had to get some sleep, so I stood up to go to bed...and I slumped to my knees, overwhelmed by an amusing vertigo that made me laugh a weak whimpering laugh. Although the night was hot and airless after a scorcher of a day, I was shivering. But my face was slippery with sweat. What’s going on here? The walls of the room bulged and wobbled. I tried to understand why my teeth were chattering although sweat ran down my cheeks into the corners of my mouth. Salty. I knelt on the floor beside my daybed, shivering, but the iron leg felt deliciously cool against my cheek, and all I wanted to do was to sleep, so I decided that I would just kneel there for a moment and...just rest for a moment...then I’d get back to that list and...

  The following morning my mother found me coiled up on the floor beside my bed, asleep, my pajamas damp with sweat. I was very ill.

  For the next three days and nights I alternately froze and simmered, clutching my hastily unpacked Hudson Bay to my chin, or feebly trying to kick the stifling thing away. In a reversal of our traditional roles, I was the one who wheezed and coughed until I thought my ribs would crack with the effort of trying to raise thick, stringy phlegm, while my mother made mustard plasters for my chest and rubbed my back with Balm Bengu. A harassed intern came in response to my mother’s telephone call from Kane’s cornerstore. He said I had something called ‘a tr
opical ague’ that, according to him, I had caught because I was run down. He warned Mother to keep me warm and give me plenty of liquids to fight the fever, lest the pleurisy that made breathing painful develop into full-blown pneumonia. One day blurred into the next as I lay there, slipping in and out of fever. My mother kept the radio on at low volume so I wouldn’t feel abandoned while she and Anne-Marie worked in the next room, packing and re-packing as quietly as they could. Fragments of comedy shows, news broadcasts, dramas, popular music and soap operas slithered in and out of my consciousness, sometimes in bewildering tangles, but sometimes fitting together suddenly in a way that let me glimpse a great truth. The great truth. And it was so obvious! Why hadn’t I always known it? But this great and lucid truth was so fragile that when I tried to recall what it was, it disintegrated and fled my mind. Again and again, or maybe only once with a long echo, I reminded myself that our train would be pulling out in just a few days, by which time I had to be well and strong, because our tickets couldn’t be postponed or exchanged for a later date. If we were ever going to get out of Pearl Street, it had to be now. Now or never...or never...never...

  In the early hours of the fourth night, I opened my eyes and saw streetlight patterns on the ceiling. They were amazingly sharp and meaningful. I drew a long tentative breath, ready to stop with the first pain. But my lungs didn’t hurt, and they were dry. I squeezed my hands into fists, and for the first time in days they didn’t feel weak. My hair still hurt at the roots and my eyes were stiff and made squeaking sounds when I looked to the sides, but the fever had broken and, although everything seemed overly intense and strangely ‘elsewhere’, I knew I had passed through the crisis. I smiled into the darkness and felt both happy and lucky. I considered going into the back bedroom to tell my mother that I was well, but she and Anne-Marie had worked through that day’s sapping heat and were deep in the greedy sleep of the truly weary, so I smiled again, closed my eyes and let myself slip into a safe, cozy slumber.