by Trevanian
I always muttered aloud as I played all the characters in my story games; and there in the alley that late summer afternoon I was muttering harder than usual as I questioned a snide, sneering German officer I'd captured. Because my story games were always tense and emotional, the volume of my muttering and the vigor of my gestures tended to increase unless, as sometimes happened, I glanced up and blanched to find someone looking at me. I would quickly convert the dramatic monologue into a song (with gestures), because although talking to yourself is a sure sign of being nutty, there is no shame attached to singing to yourself. But I never felt the ploy had really worked, so I would wander away, furious with the eavesdropper for spoiling the game.
Well, I was muttering hard, explaining our desperate situation to my followers, having ordered Doc to blindfold the German officer so he couldn't see the map I was scratching on the ground, when my concentration was snagged by a sharp tapping sound. Annoyed by the interruption, I looked around, but I couldn't see anybody, so I started explaining that we had to stop those Germans from advancing another inch, even if it meant laying down our—again I was interrupted by the tap-tap-tap of metal against glass. I looked up and down the alley. Nothing. I was all alone. Then a movement at the edge of my peripheral vision caused me to lift my eyes, and there looking down at me was Mrs McGivney, our block's crazylady, smiling in that soft, sweet way of hers. Immediately my followers vanished, as did the four or five thousand Nazi Strong Troopers dug in at the far end of the alley, and I was left all alone, the leader of men suddenly shriveled into a skinny little kid caught talking to himself.
The block's belief that Mrs McGivney was crazy was based on her peculiar shopping habits, her excessive shyness, and the long, old-fashioned dresses she always wore. She was never seen on the street except for quick trips over to Kane's Grocery, always at closing time. Even if other people were ahead of her, Mr Kane would serve her as soon as she came in, because she was very timid and would slip away and not come back until the next evening rather than risk being noticed or, yet more upsetting, spoken to. Respecting her sensitivity, Mr Kane never spoke to her. He would just smile and raise his eyebrows above his thick glasses, and she would quickly mutter off her shopping list, which he would fill, toppling cans from their high stacks with his can-grabber gizmo and catching them in his apron with that theatrical brio of his, or scooping macaroni or rice from one of his tip-out bins and hissing it into a little sack on his scales, always bringing the weight up to just a bit more than you asked for, or slicing cheese off the block in the hand-cranked slicing machine.
After filling her order, Mr Kane would tell Mrs McGivney the total cost as he marked it down in the dog-eared book he kept under the counter, a book that was called his 'slate', although it was made of cardboard and paper. Mrs McGivney would take her sack and scurry back across the street to her apartment, never looking up for fear of catching someone's eye. Once a month, she came in with a check, which he cashed for her, subtracting the cost of her groceries. Everyone knew that Mrs McGivney received a small monthly government check for 'disability', which the street understood to mean because she was a nut, but Mr Kane once told me that in his opinion she was just painfully shy. But her reputation for insanity was an element of received street tradition and therefore impervious to evidence or reasoning. Even the modest check she got from the government was taken as proof, if any were needed, that she was insane. How else could a crazylady stay alive? She could hardly get a job... except maybe at a nut factory! And there was the suspicious way she would appear from time to time at her window giving onto the back alley and look down at the kids playing there, not bawling them out for making noise like any sane person would, or shouting at them for throwing stones that might put somebody's eye out. No, Mrs McGivney just smiled down on us sweetly... exactly like a crazylady would do.
And now there she was, standing at her window, smiling down at me after having scattered both my followers and my enemies to the recesses of my imagination.
She beckoned to me. She'd never done that to any of the kids before! I made a broad mime of looking around to see who she could possibly want before pointing at my chest, my eyebrows arched in operatic disbelief. She smiled and nodded. I lifted my palms and tucked my head into my shoulders to say, but what did I do? She tapped the window again with a nickel—so that's how she'd made that sharp noise—then she pointed to the coin, then to me, clearly meaning that she intended to give the nickel to me. She beckoned again and made a big round gesture, which told me to go to the end of the alley, around to the street, and to her apartment building. I really didn't want to; my worst nightmares were about being pursued by crazy people. But I was a polite kid, so I went. Even the wildest and toughest of us kids, several of whom ended up in prison and one on death row, would be accounted polite by today's standards. Then too, if there was a chance to earn a little money, I could hardly let it pass me by, considering how my mother regularly risked her health for just a few extra bucks. Resentful of losing my game and dreading my encounter with a crazylady, I left the alley—but not before rubbing out the map with my heel, so the enemy couldn't find out my plans.
The staircase of 232 was dark because the hall windows meant to illuminate the stairs had been blocked up when the slum landlord divided the buildings up into small apartments and put a narrow bathroom into the front of each hall. Although it was dark, I ascended the staircase with a sure step because 232 was identical to 238, where I lived.
I tiptoed up to the top floor landing and stood there in the dark, uncertain. Maybe it would be best to sneak back down and out into the light and bustle of the street, but as I turned, the door to the back apartment opened and Mrs McGivney stood there, smiling.
"Would you mind going over to Mr Kane's for me?" she asked in a little-girl voice. "I'll give you a nickel." Her voice went up on the first syllable of 'nickel' in a kind of sing-song temptation.
"Well, I don't... All right, sure, I'll go." I was relieved that she only wanted me to do a chore for her and not something... crazy.
She had a list written out, and she said Mr Kane would put it on his slate.
When I returned with the small bag of groceries she was waiting at the head of the stairs and she gave me the nickel she had tapped the window with.
"Thanks." I put the nickel in my pocket and patted it to make sure it was there. The year before, I had lost a quarter. It must have just fallen out of my pocket on my way to the Bond Bread bakery to buy a week's worth of what was euphemistically called 'day old' bread. Until it got too dark, I walked back and forth along my path, hoping to find the quarter. No luck.
"Just bring the bag in, would you please?"
I followed her into her parlor, where she took the bag and brought it into the kitchen, leaving me standing there. On a round table by the window that gave onto the back alley there were two glasses of milk already poured out and a little decorated plate with four homemade sugar cookies on it. The room was filled with frilly old-fashioned furniture and it smelled of furniture wax and recent baking... the sugar cookies; and in the corner an old man sat facing the other window. His eyes were pointed towards the buildings across the alley, but I could tell he wasn't seeing anything. I said he was old, but the only old thing about him was a soft halo of fine white hair that held the sunlight like the lace curtains did. His face was unlined, his skin was tight, and he sat there in a straight-backed chair, staring through the curtains out across the alley with an infinite calm in his unblinking, pale blue eyes. Spooky.
Mrs McGivney returned from the kitchen and stood beside the little table, holding the back of her chair, waiting for me to sit down.
"Gee, thanks a lot, but I think maybe I'd better..." But she smiled sadly at me, so I sat down. What else could I do?
There was a heavy linen napkin on each plate. Mrs McGivney took hers and put it on her lap, so I did the same, only mine slipped onto the floor. She smiled again and pointed her nose towards the plate of cookies, indicating t
hat I should take one. I did. She took a tiny bite out of hers, and I tried to do the same, but two bits broke off, one falling onto the floor and the other getting stuck in the corner of my mouth so that I had to push it in with my finger, and I wished I were somewhere else... anywhere.
She smiled a little pursed smile that didn't show her teeth. "You live three houses up, don't you."
I nodded.
"And you're Mrs LaPointe's boy."
I nodded again, wondering how she knew, considering that she never talked to anyone.
"What's your name?"
"Luke. Well, it's really Jean-Luc, but only my mother calls me that. I like to be called just Luke."
"John-Luke. That's foreign, isn't it?"
"French. My mother's family is French Canadian. And part Indian."
"John-Luke's a nice name."
"Only my mother calls me that."
"I've noticed that you always play alone."
"Not always. But mostly, yeah."
"Why is that?"
"Why do I play alone?" I glanced past her towards the old man, wondering if we were supposed to pretend he wasn't there. "Well, mostly because I make up my own games, and other kids don't know the rules or the names of the people or, well... how to play."
"And you read an awful lot, don't you."
How did she know that I read a lot... then it hit me. I always cut through the alley on my way home from the library, not because it was the shortest way, but to avoid the little kids who, whenever they saw me with an armful of books, would chant 'professor, pro-fes-sor, pro-fes-sor', which was one of my street names. My other street name was 'Frenchy' because of my name, which was even more French-sounding when my mother reverted to her maiden name, LaPointe, but with a Mrs so as to justify us kids I suppose. On my first day at P.S. 5 my teacher said how interesting it must be to have a French name. I hated teachers who tried to be palsy and modern. So far as I was concerned, they could forget the social worker crap. All I wanted from a teacher was information. No sincerity, no affection, no concern, thank you; just information. She wrote Jean-Luc on the board, and for the first couple of weeks I had to deal with being called Jean, a girl's name. There was teasing and a couple of fights after school—the usual trial by ordeal that every new kid on the block had to face. I was prickly and quick to go to Fistcity, always getting my first couple of shots in while the other kid thought we were still in the Oh yeah?... Yeah! preliminaries. Most of the kids at P.S. 5 were bigger than I was, but I had an edge over them: I never gave up. Bigger kids could throw me down or knock me down, but as soon as they let me up, I always plowed into them again; and although I'd come home pretty messed up, they never got away without at least a few marks and some blood, so after a while they gave up the teasing and bullying because there wasn't much glory in being able to beat up a smaller kid, and I made sure there was always a ration of pain in it for them. I never became a leader or even anybody's best pal, but my existence on the block came to be accepted and 'the professor' was left alone. In return, I concealed my bookishness, pretending not to know the answers to teachers' questions, and occasionally making wisecracks in class, or pulling funny faces behind some admiring teacher's back after she had complimented me.
"That's right, ma'am. I do read a lot. I get some of my games from books."
"Games?"
"Like Foreign Legion. Or Three Musketeers. But mostly I get them from radio programs."
"We don't have a radio," she said with neither complaint nor apology.
I had noticed this on my first glance around the room, and I wondered how anyone could do without a radio. So totally was my understanding of life linked to our second-hand Emerson that I couldn't imagine not having The Lone Ranger or The Whistler or I Love a Mystery for excitement, or Jack Benny and Fred Allen and Amos 'n' Andy for laughter, or advice from Mr Anthony for getting an insight into everyday problems. My favorite moment of the day was the delicious anticipation of those ten or so seconds of hum while the tubes warmed up; then there was the deep satisfaction of a rich, familiar voice announcing one of the kids' adventure programs that my mother let me listen to for one hour every evening before homework. I would stand on one leg in front of the radio, my head down, my eyes defocused, totally mesmerized by what I was hearing and seeing. Seeing, for old-time radio was profoundly visual; the scenes were painted by and upon your imagination. For me, radio was real. Splendid and enthralling, but less real, were the worlds I glimpsed in books and movies. The life I lived on North Pearl Street was certainly not splendid, but neither was it real to me; just a grim limbo I would escape from as soon as 'our ship came in'. Until then, I could find solace in my story games.
"I'm afraid of them," Mrs McGivney said, offering me a second cookie, which I politely refused, then reluctantly took.
"You're afraid of radios?"
"Of everything electric," she admitted with a little smile of self-disparagement.
Only then did I notice that she didn't have electric lights. All the houses on our row still had their gas installations in place, but the gas had been cut off except for kitchen stoves. In some rooms the gas pipes had been used as conduits for the electricity, so naked bulbs dangled from stiff, fabric-wrapped wires that sprouted from the ceiling rosettes of former gas chandeliers. In our bathroom and kitchen the disused gas pipes had fancy wrought-iron keys, but you couldn't turn them because they'd been painted over so many times. But Mrs McGivney still had fancy cut-glass gas lamps on her walls, with bright brass keys to turn them on.
"Mr McGivney just loves the gaslight," she said. "He's always glad when it gets dark enough for me to turn it up." She smiled at the unmoving old man, her eyes aglow with affection.
I looked over at him, sitting there with his pale eyes directed, unseeing, out the window, his face expressionless, and I wondered how she could tell he liked the gas light. Could he speak? Did he smile? And what was wrong with him anyway? Was he crazy or something?
I felt her eyes on me, so I quickly looked away.
"Mr McGivney is a hero," she said, as though she were explaining something.
I nodded.
"My goodness! Do you know how long it's been since we've had a little boy come visit us?" she asked.
"No, ma'am." I didn't really care. All I wanted was an opening to tell her that I'd better be getting home.
"It's been a long, long time. Michael—that's my nephew?—he used to visit us sometimes. I don't think he much liked coming up here, but Ellen—my sister?—she used to make him come. And every time he came, I'd give him some of my sugar cookies. He used to like my sugar cookies, unlike some little boys I could mention."
"I like your sugar cookies, too, Mrs McGivney. I think they're... nice. Real nice. Well, I guess I'd better be going. My mother's been sick and—"
"Mr McGivney is a hero," she said again, sticking to her own line of thought and ignoring mine. I could tell she wanted to talk about him, but I was uncomfortable with the waxy-clean smell of the place, and with that smooth-faced old man staring out at nothing, so I told her that my mother would be wondering where I was, and I thanked her for the milk and cookies. She sighed and shrugged, then she opened the door for me, and I escaped down the dark staircase.
I sat for a while on my stoop before going into our apartment where I knew my mother would be in bed, bored with her most recent siege of lung trouble and smelling of mustard plaster and Baume Bengué. Kids were playing stickball in the street, blocking traffic and exchanging insults with an impatient truck driver who wanted to get through. The game broke up when second base drove off, and the kids clustered around Mr Kane's corner store for a while, then drifted down Livingston Avenue towards the docks. I knew they'd end up wandering through the deserted warehouses down by the river, snooping around in the rubble-littered, piss-smelling, water-dripping vastnesses. They'd probably use their slingshots to shatter the few windowpanes that remained tauntingly intact, then, bored, they'd wander back and cluster again in front of Mr Kane'
s until someone thought of some other trouble to get into.
Kids had been playing stickball that day back in June 1936, when my mother, sister, and I first found ourselves sitting on the front stoop of 238 North Pearl Street, our clothes and bedding in cardboard boxes on the sidewalk, and our few pieces of furniture looking shamefully worn and shoddy in the unforgiving glare of sunlight. I was six years old, and my sister four. She was hungry and sleepy and close to tears after the long trip down to Albany from Lake George Village in our uncle's rattletrap of a truck. My mother looked anxiously up and down the street for my father. She hadn't seen him in five years, not since the morning he went out to look for work and didn't come back, leaving her pregnant with my sister and only two dollars and some change in her purse. Then a letter arrived saying he was sorry he had run away from the family he loved, but he just couldn't stand not being able to support us, and he knew that her family would give us a hand if he was out of the way. Mother's family hadn't approved of him because he was a gambler and a con man—fair enough reasons. Then, after five years without a word from him, a letter came out of the blue, saying he had found a job and an apartment in Albany, where we could make a new start. My uncle had had us on his hands since my father abandoned us, and he made no bones about resenting the time and money it cost him to bring us down to Albany, so when my father wasn't there in the street to welcome us, my uncle just unloaded our stuff in grumpy haste and left us there, hoping to make it back to Lake George before nightfall because his old truck had no headlights. Leaving my sister to watch over our things, Mother and I went into the red brick building to look for our apartment. That was my first experience of that medley of smells—boiled cabbage, mildew, Lysol, other people—that I would come to recognize as the smell of the slums, the smell of poverty and hopelessness, cold and eternal in the nostrils. There was an envelope stuck into the crack of the door of apartment #2, and in it there was the key and a note from my father saying that he had gone to buy something special for a party, and he would be back in a jiffy. We went back outside and sat on the stoop, waiting for him. We never saw him again.