by Trevanian
For the next seven years we lived on North Pearl Street, a typical slum block of the Thirties. Shoals of dirty brats with runny noses, nits, and impetigo playing noisy games of kick-the-can or stickball in the street while unshaven out-of-work men in stretched, sweaty undershirts talked in loud voices from stoop to stoop on hot summer nights as they sucked at quart bottles of ale. They scoffed at those who had managed to get jobs. "You won't catch me kissing up to some boss just to get a job pushing a broom or digging a ditch!" Clearly, they were above that sort of thing. Only a handful of men on our block had regular jobs, a couple with the Bond Bread bakery on the corner, and a few doing part-time work on the loading platform of the Burgermeister brewery. North Pearl was predominantly Irish, ghetto Irish, who were content to live on handouts in the slums generation after generation, bullying their cringing wives and beating their rebellious kids, while the more ambitious Irish worked their way into the mainstream of America, finding jobs in the first generation and professions in the second. The men of North Pearl lived off of transient WPA jobs and Child Benefit checks. Of Albany's poor, only the Irish ever got those cushy WPA jobs that consisted of leaning on a shovel and looking with judicial interest into a hole that someone else had dug weeks before. This was because the political machine that ran Albany was the O'Conner Gang.
The Irish families on our block had received welfare for so long they had come to consider it a basic civil right, but my mother writhed in shame that circumstances had reduced her to living on public charity. Her! Ruth Lillian LaPointe who, like all the LaPointes, had always worked for everything she got! But she had been buffeted by repeated blows. First her charming, handsome, glib husband deserted her, leaving her to provide for two babies just when the Depression was at its deepest and darkest. Then her father, who had stepped in to help to the best of his limited resources, died in a car crash. Then her always fragile lungs gave out, so that she got ill every time she tried to work, as she stubbornly insisted on doing every Christmas.
Although North Pearl Street was a sump for society's lost, damaged, and incapable, I never felt inferior to anyone else, not even to those lucky kids in the Mickey Rooney movies who lived in small towns with big lawns and Sunday dinners, and had wryly benevolent fathers who remembered that they, too, had been rascals when they were young. I didn't feel inferior because my mother wouldn't let me. Okay, so the chips were down for us at that particular moment; she admitted that. We were going through a rough patch, no denying it. But she made it clear that, unlike our neighbors, my sister and I didn't belong in the slums. And not only did we not belong there, but we weren't going to stay. No, sir! One of these days our ship would come in, and when it did... we'd be out of there in a flash. Boy-o-boy just you watch our smoke!
Between bouts of lung trouble, my mother was energetic, doggedly optimistic, and full of laughter and games; and unlike the haggard, drained mothers of other kids on the block, ours was young and slim and pretty. My sister and I were proud of her, but always a little apprehensive too. Our pride flowed from the fact that this resilient, courageous woman was unfailingly supportive of us, encouraging the slightest glimmer of talent or gift, and assuring us that only a dirty trick of Fate had dumped us into the poverty of Pearl Street, where we didn't belong. (But we'll be out of here just as soon as our ship comes in, you mind my words!) Our apprehension had to do with Mother's hairtrigger temper which flashed out at the least, often imagined, slight to her dignity—an oversensitivity common among those who know their ethnic background is viewed with derision or disfavor and who, in aggressive compensation, feistily boast of those despised roots. Mother boasted about being French-'n'-Indian, the first ethnic strain accounting, in her view, for her refined taste, and the second making her a dangerous person to cross.
One manifestation of my mother's bristly pride was her refusal to accept that, poor though she was, her kids couldn't have what she called a 'decent Christmas', which involved her finding part-time work as a waitress in some cheap restaurant that needed help over the holiday season. She would get back from work late at night, having walked all the way through the cold and slush to save money for our presents, and inevitably her lungs would give out by Christmas morning, which she would spend lying on the living room couch, fevered and coughing, watching my sister and me open presents that were too expensive for our condition of life. Several times she ended up in the hospital with pneumonia, and once she was put into a sanatorium for two months, during which my sister and I were sent to a Catholic orphanage, a grim prisonlike institution set in wintry fields of corn stubble that seemed infinitely bleak to city kids. The first day, a brother took me aside and told me that I should pray every night for my mother's recovery. That night I alternately prayed and cried into my pillow, because it had never occurred to me that she might die, leaving Anne-Marie and me there forever.
The boys wore gray canvas uniforms, and we marched in silence to meals, classes, and prayer, our lives punctuated and dictated by clamorous electric bells. We showered in cold water and slept in an unheated cavernous dormitory that was supposed to 'harden us up' against the rigors of life, but it only kept us in a permanent state of drippy noses, sore throats, and ear aches. Discipline was rigid and hierarchical, the older boys being in charge of the younger. This led to bullying and illegal late night beatings with wet towels carried out in the shower room within a ring of older boys.
Anne-Marie and I were separated upon arrival at the orphanage, and she was sent to the girls' wing where, only five years old and having no idea where I was, she cried herself to sleep every night and reverted to bed-wetting, for which she was both ridiculed and punished. She was picked on because she was pretty and vulnerable, and bigger girls yanked her around by her long, blond hair. One afternoon a couple of weeks after we arrived, I was in the tangled mass of boys that ran and hooted and screamed wildly during the pandemonium of our unmonitored recess periods, when I thought I heard Anne-Marie's voice within the chaos. I searched for her among the tight-packed shoal of blue-uniformed girls who used to watch the rampaging boys from their side of the high chain-link fence that separated us, but before I found her the bells rang and we had to run back inside and leave the exercise yard for the girls. I later learned that I had walked right past her while she vainly called my name. I couldn't hear her through the din, and I failed to recognize her because a nun had cropped her hair in an effort to save her from being tormented by envious girls. She cried all that night. But the next day I walked up and down my side of the fence until I found her, and we held fingers through a chain link while she sobbed with a mixture of relief and misery. And that's how we spent the rest of our recess periods until the day we were called into the director's office and told that we were being sent home. Our mother was well again.
It wasn't until we were home that Mother told us how the social workers had decided that she was not in good enough health to be a 'fit mother', and that we kids would remain in custody at the orphanage until we were sixteen, old enough to get jobs. Mother had used the formidable weapon of her furious French-'n'-Indian temper to browbeat the astonished social workers into letting us live together again. But next time...
To avoid there being a next time, whenever Mother had to go to the hospital, Anne-Marie and I did everything we could to conceal the fact that we were at home alone, so the social workers wouldn't send us back to the orphanage. I would wash our clothes in the bathtub, and Anne-Marie would try to keep the house clean, awkwardly wielding a broom twice her height. When I did the shopping at Mr Kane's, I would mention that my mother had told me to get this or that, or that she was feeling just fine, thank you... anything to deceive any welfare spies that might be lurking around.
My sister and I came to dread the approach of Christmas. Mother never seemed to realize how frightened we were that our fragile family would be broken up again, and permanently this time, all because of her hard-headed determination to give us 'Christmas presents every bit as nice as those rich kids g
et, come Helen Highwater!'
For years I thought of Helen Highwater as some sort of avenging she-devil who descended upon people who were trying to get things done. You see, my mother had a flawed ear for idioms and adages, which she often twisted around, like accusing someone or something of being 'dull as dishwater', or her life-long assumption that the 'hoi polloi' were the snobbish upper crust of society. When she said the word she always used to push the tip of her nose up with her finger to illustrate the snootiness of the hoi polloi. I suspect that she was sustained in this error by the similarity between 'hoi polloi' and 'hoity-toity'.
The welfare agency gave us $7.27 a week, and through careful buying, extreme self-denial, and great imagination in the planning of meals, my mother managed to feed and clothe us on what worked out to a little less than thirty-five cents per person per day. The welfare paid our rent directly to our faceless slum landlord instead of giving us the money and letting us find our own accommodations. They paid much more for our three-room apartment than people with money in hand would have been asked, but then as now the Lords of Poverty didn't trust the poor not to squander or drink up their money.
So the welfare system gave us basic shelter and food, but we were on our own when it came to those little extras that made life more than a daily grind of survival: birthday and Christmas presents, or going to the movies once a month, or buying my sister a nice dress 'once in a blue noon' to give a little variety to her wardrobe of ill-fitting hand-me-downs provided by the nuns at Saint Joseph's Convent, or buying a pound of the coffee that was my mother's only hedonistic vice (just two cups a day), or for the special holiday celebrations she used to make for us, like our long-awaited and much-appreciated Easter treat of 'Virginia Baked Ham' that she confected from two cans of Spam, a can of pineapple and a small bottle of maple syrup. Mother used to shape and score the Spam and arrange the rings of pineapple, then bake it so that it looked exactly like a miniature glazed ham, and we used to have yams with margarine and maple syrup, which was cheaper than sugar in those days because Vermont sugarbush owners were suffering badly from the Depression. It was my job to color the margarine, putting the white block of grease into a bowl, then sprinkling the orange coloring powder over it and mixing it in with a fork until it looked like butter... though it still smelled like grease. It would not be until the war came along and absorbed all the produce of America's Dairyland that the powerful butter lobby allowed precolored margarine onto the market.
These little life-enhancing pleasures could not be had on thirty-five cents a day per person, so extra money had to be made either by my mother or by me, shining shoes or running errands. And sometimes we just had to do without. But even when things seemed their grimmest, Mother used to assure my sister and me that one of these days our ship would come in and carry us far, far away from the slums to some Easy Street out West where we'd never again know the helplessness and hopelessness that is the worst part of poverty. When I was little, I envisioned Mother's metaphorical ship pulling in at one of the Hudson River piers, and my mother and sister and I would walk up the gangplank, and never look back. But one night we were sitting at the kitchen table and Mother was dreamily describing the splendid house we would live in one of these days, when I became rich and famous... and with a shock of ice at the pit of my stomach I suddenly realized that I was the ship my mother was waiting for, and it was my task in life to rescue us from Pearl Street. The weight of responsibility was staggering, and it was soon after this recognition that I began to lose myself in my story games.
Evening came as I sat on our stoop, thinking about the day we arrived in Albany with our boxes of stuff and our bits of battered furniture standing on the pavement for everyone to see. I got up from the dirty step that left a gritty mottle on the backs of my bare legs and went in. As I passed through our kitchen I dropped the nickel Mrs McGivney had given me into our Dream Bank, which was an empty box of Diamond kitchen matches we hid on the shelf under the real box of matches to baffle any thief who might come snooping around. The Dream Bank was money saved up from Mother's occasional part-time jobs and from my rounds of the bars and taverns downtown on Friday nights, carrying my hand-made shoeshine box on my shoulder and asking men if they wanted a shine (black and brown polish only, no two-tone shoes), which only the occasional drunk or some guy trying to impress a woman ever wanted, although sometimes they'd give me a nickel or even a dime to get rid of me. Like selling apples on the street corner, shining shoes during the Depression was a way of begging without total loss of dignity. The Dream Bank was supposed to be for special things that would bring color into our lives... we bought our second-hand Emerson radio with the cracked Bakelite case from it, paying twenty-five cents a week for over a year... but more often than not, it got emptied out for dull, soon-forgotten things, like food or clothes.
That evening after the last of my radio programs, I tugged myself back to reality and went to sit on the edge of my mother's bed to play two-handed 'honeymoon' pinochle with her, while my sister cut out and colored dresses for her paper dolls. To save the cost of new paper doll books, my mother would buy one then trace the clothes, tabs and all, onto paper she gleaned by cutting open brown paper bags and ironing them flat. In this way, one paper doll book did the service of half a dozen, lasting until the cardboard dolls got too limp from handling to stand up. My sister would spend hours drawing her own designs and coloring them in, then hanging them onto the cardboard dolls in a series of 'fittings', all the while twittering animatedly as she played both the dressmaker and the customer, usually a rich, spoiled, very demanding actress. Anne-Marie loved to create styles from what she saw in the movies or in magazines, but her games were burdened, and to some degree spoiled, by my mother's need to see everything we did in terms of its potential as the ship that was sure to come in and rescue us from Pearl Street. That summer, Mother was sure that Anne-Marie would become a famous costume designer for the movies and bring us all to Hollywood, just as she viewed my bookishness as a sign that I would become a university professor and take us all to live in some nice college town upstate.
...Or maybe a doctor. As my mother was often in and out of charity hospitals, I guess it's natural that her romantic ideal was The Doctor, just as her implacable enemies were The Nurses, particularly the impolite or dismissive ones who were, my mother was sure, jealous of the interest the doctors took in her unique 'lung condition', which never did receive a specific name like bronchitis or emphysema or pleurisy. So one of the ways she proposed for me to lure our Ship of Hope close enough to shore for us to slip on unnoticed, was by becoming a doctor. For one whole winter, I wove and unraveled games in which I was a famous doctor who somehow managed to save the lives of rich patients without having to come into physical contact with them. Even in my games I was too squeamish to deal with people on the level of blood and pus and... other liquids.
I always felt relieved when the honor, and responsibility, of bringing our ship in was bestowed upon Anne-Marie, if not as a famous fashion designer, then as a dancer. Even as a little kid, Anne-Marie loved music and used to sing and dance around to our Emerson. Some neighbor told my mother that she had talent, 'a born professional, believe you me!' and overnight it was decided that she would be the girl chosen to replace Shirley Temple, who, after all, couldn't remain young and cute forever, could she? The next day Mother put Anne-Marie's hair up in bouncy sausage curls like Shirley's (we called her by her first name now that we were all in show business). The sausage curls would help talent scouts from Hollywood to spot her, and the next thing you knew, we'd all be in sunny California, living, as my mother with her tin ear for idiom put it, 'on the flat of the land.'
...As differs from the slippery hillside?
But for this dream to come true, Anne-Marie would need to have tap-dancing lessons, and that was out of the question, because group classes cost $1.50 per session and she would need at least two a week, which would have been more than a third of the $7.27 we received from the welfare
people. So the Shirley Temple dream was put on the shelf for a while, and we went back to daydreaming about the things we would own and do when I became a rich diagnostician, famous for my unique 'hands-off' technique.
Mother's bouts of illness always followed the same pattern. She would come down with a fever and she'd hack and cough, gasping for breath as she hung over the edge of her bed to help the phlegm 'come up', a process that tested the limits of my squeamishness. I would sit on the edge of her bed late into the night, trying to relieve her wracking cough by making and applying mustard plasters and by rubbing her back with Baume Bengué. (As a little kid I had marveled at how Dr Bengué managed to sign all those tubes. Each and every one! And later I was embarrassed at having been so gullible.) As she dozed, worn out by her ordeal, I would read library books she got for me because I was too young to have a card for the adult section. When I woke at dawn, having dropped off over my book, I would be sweaty and my clothes would be all twisted. The apartment would smell of mustard and eucalyptus, but usually her coughing would have abated and her temperature would have dropped enough that we could go to school. But the next evening the fever and coughing would begin again until the attack had run its course, leaving her wan and thin.