by Trevanian
Some bigger boys, fourteen or fifteen years old, loitered in front of a cornerstore diagonally across the street from our stoop. Fully aware of the gaggle of girls who admired them from two stoops away and whom they ostentatiously ignored, the boys talked loudly, pushed one another in gruff play, snorted out forced laughs and repeatedly glanced at their reflections in the cornerstore window with satisfaction, although now and then one of them felt obliged to hook a comb out from his back pocket and drag it through his Brylcreem’d hair, then press the sides into place with a caressing palm. They played an endless round-robin of that finger game in which paper covers rock, rock smashes scissors and scissors cut paper, known by different names in various parts of the country, but called “Rochambeau” in the urban Northeast by generations of kids who had no idea that a French general who had helped our infant republic defeat the British at Yorktown had been immortalized in a child’s game, much less how to spell the chanted sound as they threw their fingers out on the “-bow!” of the third syllable. The loser of Rochambeau had to let the winner “knuckle” him, hit him on the top of the head as hard as he wanted to with the knuckle of his middle finger. The one who got knuckled would snort disdainfully although the pain sometimes dampened his eyes with fugitive tears, which he quickly blinked away as he rearranged his hair in the store window. Two of the boys were smoking, the biggest one, who was the leader, and a small ugly one who played the role of flunky and clown. They smoked like kids new to smoking do, trying to appear supremely casual, but fussily examining the burning ends of their cigarettes with grave frowns and tapping off the ash more frequently than it could gather. These older boys wore long trousers and were bare-headed, while the younger boys of the block were in knickerbockers and caps. Only very young boys wore short pants. Except for me, of course! The principal bane of my life was my mother’s need to dress my sister and me better than other kids, in compensation, I suppose, for our lack of a father and a secure breadwinner. Because she couldn’t afford new clothes, the hand-me-downs my sister and I wore were always cleaner and more freshly ironed than those of our playmates, yet another of those differences that kids will not endure.
The strange new sounds and gestures of life and play that I observed with a mixture of fascination and malaise from our stoop that first afternoon would, in the course of the eight and a half years I was to live on North Pearl Street, become the unremarkable and unremarked ambience of “my block,” with its noise, its squalor, its childhood rites and ordeals, the awkward rutting rituals of its adolescents, and its shoals of dirty brats with runny noses, nits and impetigo playing their screaming games of kick-the-can or stick ball, sassing icemen and pushcart vendors, blocking traffic and exchanging insults with truck drivers who wanted to get through.
On that first day, the game of stick ball in the middle of the street broke up when second base drove off. The preening boys in front of the cornerstore drifted away down Livingston Avenue toward the deserted warehouses between the freight yards and the river, where, as I would learn by being one of them, they would snoop around the dripping, echoey, broken-glass-crunchy-under-foot, piss-smelling vastnesses of abandoned buildings, and they would chuck stones at the few windowpanes that remained tauntingly intact. North Pearl Street was a typical slum of the first half of what would be called the American Century. These slum blocks were identical in their essence and social effects, varying only in the cultural decoration of their ethnic concentrations. Pearl Street was Irish. More precisely, it was bog Irish.1
Pearl Street was the sort of place that appeared, laundered and tempered with humor and hokey sentimentality, in films starring the Dead End Kids: sassy-mouthed but essentially good boys who only needed one of Hollywood’s grittier stars to sort them out and make honest, hard-working citizens of them. But the violent, reality-callused kids of North Pearl would have scoffed at the efforts of a tough (but warm-hearted) Father Pat O’Brien or a wryly knowing Father Spencer Tracy to “save” them by opening a boys’ club and showing them that priests could be reg’lar fellas.
While we were sitting on the stoop anticipating the surprise my father had prepared for us, a thin layer of milky cloud began to spread over the sky, and the chill of a March afternoon settled on us. I was ready to give in and suggest that we go inside to look for my father, when the front door of a building across the street flew open, banging against the brick wall, and out poured a yelping, shrieking pack of children belonging to what we would come to know as the Meehans: a wild, drunken, dim-witted tribe that inhabited three contiguous houses on the east side of the street. All the Meehans were related in complex and unnatural ways. The four old Meehans, two brothers and two sisters, had produced half a dozen loud, dirty, boozy Meehan adults; and random, transient matings between and among this second generation of brothers/sisters/cousins and their parents had spawned some twenty offspring, who combined among themselves and with the earlier generations to produce a scattering of son/nephew/uncle/cousin/grandsons and daughter/niece/aunt/cousin/granddaughters. While all the Meehans had earned their family name at least twice over, only one of them was called “Mrs. Meehan.” The rest were known by their full names: Old Joe Meehan, the tribal chief; Young Joe Meehan, the heir apparent; Patrick Meehan, the dangerous one; Maeve Meehan, the nasty one; or Brigid Meehan, the willing one.
Ironically, the one called “Mrs. Meehan” on the block was the only woman of that tribe who was not related to the rest of the adults by blood. One of the Meehan men had been put into an institution for the dim-witted for a while, and he returned with a woman he had found there. It was she who did most of the tribe’s cooking, cared for the younger children, and did such cleaning as took place in their warren . . . mostly scattering the litter around by batting at it with a ratty broom.
This “Mrs. Meehan” was the epicenter of the consternation and wailing that erupted through their front door and poured down the stoop. She was clutching a smoking iron skillet, and the kids surrounding her were sobbing and screaming, “Drop it, Ma! Drop it!” Her face was twisted in agony because the skillet handle was burning her hand, but still she clung to it, whimpering. A Meehan male appeared at the top of the stoop wearing a sweat-stained undershirt, beer bottle in fist. He shouted at “Mrs. Meehan” to put the goddamned skillet down, for the love of Jesus! What did she think she was playing at there?
“Help me!” she beseeched, the pain causing her to bare her teeth.
But he only sniffed and shook his head. “Crazy bitch.”
A tousled female opened the front window of the next Meehan house and thrust out her inflamed face, a cigarette glued to her lower lip. “What the hell?”
“It’s only herself,” the man informed his sister/cousin/mate in a tone of weary exasperation. “Up to her old tricks, she is.”
The woman shrugged and closed the window.
One of the children tried to wrench the skillet out of his mother’s hand, but he yelped and sucked at his burnt fingers. Just as my mother took Anne-Marie off her lap and was rising to dash across the street to help the poor woman, Old Joe Meehan, the doyen of the clan, appeared at the doorway. His sunken cheeks were white-stubbled and he had obviously just pulled on his tatty low-crotched trousers, because the flies were agape and he was still thumbing his suspenders up over his bare chest and tufted shoulders. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” he complained as he swatted his way through the swarm of kids. With one skillful gesture born of practice, he kicked the skillet out of Mrs. Meehan’s hand, and she screamed as some of her skin went with it. Clutching her wrist as though to pinch off the pain and keep it from rising up her arm, Mrs. Meehan docilely followed him up the stoop. Two of the kids kept watch over the still-hot skillet so that no one would steal it before another kid had returned from inside with a wad of rags to wrap around the handle so they could bring it back in, followed by the rest of the runny-nosed Meehan flock, all chattering and laughing now that the crisis was past. And suddenly the street returned to normal, and the rumble and clatter
of the city around us re-emerged.
My sister and I exchanged big-eyed looks. What kind of place was this? What kind of people?
This was my first encounter with one of the crazyladies of Pearl Street, some of whom were not really crazy at all, just eccentric or “different,” although a couple were crazy by anyone’s criteria. Over the ensuing years, my dealings with these crazyladies would punctuate the lurching, uneven stages of my growth and self-awareness.
We had been sitting on the stoop for over an hour, expecting my father to come walking around the corner at any minute. When a man did approach, Anne-Marie and I looked up at our mother to read her reaction, because neither of us would have recognized him. But none of them was our father. The March air was cooling rapidly, and Anne-Marie in her thin party dress was rubbing her upper arms to warm them, so my mother rose and looked up and down the street one final time before saying, “Well, we can’t sit here until the cows freeze over! I’m going to take a gander inside. Maybe Ray told someone where he was going and how long he’d be. You kids keep an eye on our stuff.” And she went up the stairs and into the redbrick tenement.
She came back with an envelope she had found stuck into the crack of the door of apartment 2 on the first floor. Number 238 had no apartment 1, a designation the mail carriers reserved for basement apartments that looked through the iron bars of their low windows into wells sunken below the level of the sidewalk. But the brick row of seven identical five-story buildings that included 238 had only half-basements across the front, and that space was occupied by coal bunkers, huge old iron furnaces and boilers in varying states of dilapidation. Mother sat down between us and opened the envelope to find a note and a big old-fashioned key with a bow of green crepe paper tied around it. The note was from my father; it said that he had gone out to find a bakery that had a green cake for the party and he’d be back in a jiffy. A party? Green cake? Anne-Marie and I exchanged eager glances.
“Well, we might as well get ourselves moved in,” Mother said.
Leaving Anne-Marie to watch over our things, Mother and I struggled up the stairs carrying her old Saratoga trunk with its scuffed leather bindings. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the kids across the street watching me stagger under the weight of the trunk. I’d have given anything to be able to hook one finger in the leather handle and lift it . . . just like that! . . . whistling to myself, maybe. Yes, and carrying something huge in my other hand! That would have been great!
I have always been particularly sensitive to smells, even squeamish, and when I stepped into that hall I drew my first breath of that medley of mildew, Lysol, ancient grease, rotting woodwork, sweat, rat droppings, coal dust, baby urine, and boiled cabbage . . . the residue of a hundred and fifty years of poverty and hopelessness, damp and eternal in the nostrils.
My mother and I staggered across the threshold of apartment 2, my arms feeling drawn out of their sockets by the weight of the Saratoga trunk we had dragged and scooted down the hallway’s scuffed and scruffy linoleum. We went into the kitchen to get a drink of water and were greeted by a vision. Obviously, the celebration my father planned was to be a St. Patrick’s Day party, and he had pasted strips of green crepe paper ribbon into chain links that he had looped back and forth between overhead water pipes. He must have spent hours doing it. On the narrow kitchen table there were four green paper plates with shamrocks, and standing in the middle of the table was a big bottle of green soda, presumably lime.
After drinking water directly from the faucet and getting our fronts wet in the process, Mother and I returned for more boxes and pieces of furniture. When we stepped back out onto our stoop Anne-Marie was standing in front of our boxes and furniture, her eyes shining with unwept tears of fear as she bravely interposed her little body between our possessions and the kids who had gathered to watch us move in. People had come out onto the stoops on both sides of our building and across the street, where they sat, the men sucking at quart bottles of ale, the women observing and frankly evaluating our efforts and our possessions. I would learn that watching people move in and out was a traditional community entertainment on North Pearl Street, not only because it offered an opportunity to see things that were usually hidden away in apartments, but also for the tantalizing narrative conjectures the event spawned. For those moving in, there were questions of where they had come from. What misfortune—or, better yet, disgrace—had brought them to North Pearl? What sort of people would they turn out to be? (The gossips of Pearl Street deplored two kinds of women, those who were “loose” and those who were “snooty,” the one being every bit as objectionable as the other.) For those moving out, the suppositions were more dire and the gossip more juicy. Oh, a move away from Pearl Street might result from a bit of remarkable luck, like getting a job in some other town, or marrying a man with a job, but more commonly it was a final family dispersal caused by someone dying, or being sent to prison, or by losing their child-support benefits, and the family, no longer able to sustain itself as a whole even in such a last-ditch place as Pearl Street, had been evicted by the slum landlord. Where could they go? How could they live? Would they ever be seen again? And what if they had borrowed something from you? You’d better watch that they didn’t take it with them.
Mortified to be the focus of this attention and conjecture, I worked hard to get us moved in quickly and away from their eyes and comments. To show the circle of kids that I was strong enough to take care of myself, I picked up things that were too heavy or too bulky for me to handle. To their sniggering amusement, I invariably had either an awkward struggle or a mortifying mishap in my effort to get whatever it was into the apartment, like when I finally managed to get a big box of mixed cleaning products to the top of the stoop, only to have the bottom fall out, leaving me holding the empty box while all kinds of stuff clattered back down the steps, followed by a roll of toilet paper that unwound as it went, leaving a paper trail across the sidewalk and into the gutter. After chasing it down I had to reroll it carefully, sure that all eyes were on me and that everybody was chuckling and snorting, but we couldn’t afford just to waste it. In my rush to get this humiliating task over with quickly I got the paper on crooked several times and had to unroll it and start again.
While I fumbled in angry, unproductive haste I could see out of the corners of my eyes that the women were watching my mother lift big boxes and carry them with ease. She wasn’t all that strong, but she was adroit. She was only a little over five feet tall, but she was wiry and she moved with the grace that had won her trophy cups for dancing the Charleston and the Varsity Drag when she was a seventeen-year-old flapper, only ten years before. I could tell that the women, mostly flaccid and dumpy with eating bad food, felt an immediate dislike for my mother’s short page-boy hair, her bell-bottomed slacks, and her pert, even saucy, movement and gestures. “Probably both snooty and loose,” their sniffs said.
Eventually we got all our boxes and bits into the apartment, which was rented “semifurnished,” meaning there were four straight-backed wooden chairs each of a different design, color and epoch; two chiffoniers, one with drawers that stuck open, the other with drawers that stuck shut; a sagging double bed and a handmade child’s cot in the back bedroom; a narrow table in the kitchen; and in the front room an iron daybed and, incongruous in the limited space, two wicker chairs with broken spines that caused them to twist and squeak when you sat in them and whose split canes scratched your legs and clutched at your clothes. But we were off the street and our possessions were no longer under the gaze of scoffers. Worn out with having done most of the work, Mother lay down on the daybed in the front room while Anne-Marie and I wandered through the apartment, looking into nooks and dark corners, imagining what our lives would be like in this strange new place. We flushed the toilet to see if it worked, and opened the tap in the old iron bathtub until the rust-brown water thinned to tan, then ran clear. (Apparently, the prior renters weren’t great bath-takers.) We peeked into cupboards and the apartm
ent’s only closet. We opened the door of the lead-lined icebox and quickly closed it, gagging at the knee-buckling smell of a stale icebox. Being a big brother, I threatened to push her head in and make her breathe the stink; being a little sister, she threatened to tell our mother if I did, then I’d get it. She claimed the little child’s cot in the corner of the bedroom; just right for her, because she too was little, and she would be close to Mother in the big bed, just in case someone had bad dreams and wanted to crawl in next to someone else.