The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (13 page)

Boys were prohibited by tacit sex taboos from jumping rope, but they could turn the rope for their sisters and their sisters' friends, so long as they did so with bored, sardonic expressions on their faces and eventually whipped the rope up to trip the girls and spoil their fun. Failure to ruin the game, or turning the rope for anyone who wasn't your sister, got you teased for being 'sweet on' some girl, which obliged you to fight the accuser to prove he was a dirty liar whose pants were on fire.

As soon as the snow was gone and the sidewalks were dry, baseball cards were brought out onto the street to be swapped and gambled for, three or four boys standing back about five yards from a building and flipping the cards against it. You won the other kids' cards by getting closest to the wall, or by overlapping them. It was better to overlap, because flipping a card hard enough to get really close to the wall risked denting its corners, thus reducing its swap value. Baseball cards came wrapped up with thin, rectangular, one-for-a-penny slabs of pink gum that tasted like the inside of an old woman's purse smells, sweet and powdery. This gum didn't 'blow' as well as Fleers, which came as a chubby pink cube wrapped in paper with twisted bow-tie ends and had a waxed 'funny paper' with a couple of stale jokes, a riddle, and an 'amazing fact', but you didn't get baseball cards with Fleers, so the sales of this superior bubble gum fell off drastically during the spring card-flipping season.

You only flipped duplicate cards, never risking one of your collection and hoping through skill and luck to win cards that would fill gaps in your pictures of baseball players arranged by teams. It may seem odd today, but before the Second World War, all the major-league teams of Americas 'national' sport were located in cities east of the Mississippi and north of the Mason-Dixon line, except for Washington, D.C.'s two teams. In addition to baseball cards there was a series of automobile cards depicting everything from the Model T and the Stutz Bearcat through to the newest 'airflow' models, and a series of æroplane cards (yes, with that 'æ' ligature) including fragile bi-planes, stumpy Schneider Trophy seaplanes that were little more than motors with cockpits, and modern all-metal planes, like the Ford tri-motor that flew over our street every morning just before school started, causing all the kids to arch their backs and squint up through 'binoculars' made of two hollow fists to watch it pass over carrying the airmail south to New York City. But most desirable of all during the spring of 1937 was a new line of 'War Cards', gaudy and ghastly images of Japanese atrocities against Chinese women and children that were printed in China and distributed as propaganda to solicit sympathy and assistance in their war against smaller but more modern Japan. When the attack on Pearl Harbor came almost five years later, a whole generation was preconditioned to hate the 'vile Nips' by these war cards depicting slaughtered children, their mouths agape in silent screams.

Every kid in Albany played these games, but a game unique to North Pearl Street was 'ledgey', in which a ball was aimed at an inch-wide, up-angled decorative ledge across the face of certain buildings on our block, about three feet up from the sidewalk. The bald, flabby tennis ball was thrown so hard that it hit the wall with a hollow fwop! that could be heard a block away. If the ball missed the narrow target of the ledge, as it usually did, it would simply bounce off the wall, and the opponent had to catch it before it bounced a second time. If he failed, the other player got a point and remained 'at bat'. But when a ball hit the ledge it would arc high, and if the opponent caught it in the air, the other fellow was 'out', but if the ball arc'd over the opponent's head, that counted as a four-point 'home run'. Because the game depended upon an architectural oddity that was particular to just three houses on our block, ledgey belonged to the kids of North Pearl Street and to no others, and we all became more or less skillful at playing it. One of my early humiliations was discovering that all the boys on the block and most of the girls could beat me at ledgey, which they won through their ability to throw the ball so hard that it was difficult to catch, even a flabby worn-out tennis ball with very little bounce left in it. But slowly over a couple of years I became the street's best ledgey player despite the fact that most of my adversaries were stronger than I. My advantage lay in wiry quickness and low cunning: I would run my opponents from side to side for a while, then I would place a soft little ball that made them rush forward, almost into the wall, and the best they could manage was a desperate, stabbing catch and a limp return, which gave me a relatively easy shot at the ledge, and if I hit it, the ball would arc out of reach. Home run! Gee, it's sorta hard to get those high ones, isn't it. Sorry, pal! Who's next?

In time I gained acceptance and even a certain amount of status among the kids of the block. Some of this status was earned by my skill at ledgey, but most of it came from the tough, sassy mouth I developed defensively. People who lived in the buildings with good ledgey facades were driven mad by the constant fwop. They didn't seem to appreciate the finer points of the game that caused kids to scream and shout outside their windows and occasionally to send a stray ball crashing through one of their panes, instantly dispersing the kids into side alleys and basement doorways as the street became absolutely silent for a few minutes, like a forest after a gunshot. At least once in the course of each animated game somebody would open a window and stick out his head. “Hey! I'm trying to sleep for the love of God! You kids get the hell away from here, you hear me?” I would pull my cap down tight by the brim and remind the complainer that he didn't own the world, and he'd tell me that I'd better get going if I didn't want my ass kicked, and I'd say: Oh yeah? You and who's uncle? Then I'd turn and walk away slowly with an I-don't-give-a-damn swagger, but quaking inside and ready to take to my heels if I heard the sound of a door being opened. The kids never recognized that my swagger was a cocky sham. “He don't take shit offa nobody, that kid! He's like his crazy mother.” Not taking shit offa nobody was an admired quality on Pearl Street.

North Pearl might have been a sump for society's lost, damaged and incapable, but my sister and I never felt inferior, not even to those lucky kids in the movies who lived in small towns with big lawns and had wryly benevolent fathers who remembered what rascals they had been when they, too, were young. We didn't feel inferior because my mother wouldn't let us. She made it clear that, unlike most of our neighbors, we didn't belong on North Pearl. Bad luck and the Depression had dumped us there, but we weren't going to stay. No, sir! One of these days we'd be out of there in a flash. Boy-o-boy just you watch our smoke!

Society provided our basic shelter and food, but we were on our own when it came to those little extras that separate life from the daily grind of survival, such things as birthday or Christmas presents, or a nice dress for my sister who was very sensitive to clothes and fashion, or the coffee that was my mother's only hedonistic vice, or special holiday meals like our long-awaited Easter treat of 'Virginia Baked Spam' made from two cans of Spam, a small three-slice can of pineapple and a bottle of imitation maple syrup. Mother used to shape and score the Spam, arrange the rings of pineapple, then pour a little maple syrup over it and bake it so that it came out looking almost exactly like a miniature glazed ham, and we used to have it with yams on which we melted margarine. It was my job to color the margarine, putting the white, lard-like block into a bowl then sprinkling orange coloring powder over it and mixing with a fork until it was more brazenly yellow than any butter would dare to be. Not until the war came along to absorb all of dairyland's produce did the butter lobby allow pre-colored margarine onto the market in dairy states like Wisconsin and New York.

Christmas presents, coffee, Virginia Baked Spam, these little indulgences and pleasures required money beyond our 35¢ per person per day, and this had to be made either by Mother working as a waitress, or by me carrying my home-made shoeshine box on rounds of the bars on Friday nights (black and brown polish only, no two-toned shoes). But even when things seemed their grimmest, my mother would assure my sister and me that one of these days we'd wake up and find ourselves on Easy Street.

'Easy Street' was one of my mother's favorite songs. The surest indication that she had emerged from a spell of the blues was hearing her sing such up-beat songs as she cooked supper. The three of us sang together almost every night as she sat at the table darning and Anne-Marie and I did the supper dishes, me washing, she wiping, standing on a chair because she was so little. Among our favorites were those defiantly optimistic songs that appeared during the first years of the Depression. Not only did these songs urge you to live your life 'On the Sunny Side of the Street' but they insisted that it wasn't all that bad to be poor, because 'The Best Things in Life Are Free', and love was among those finer things in life that were to be had on the cheap, like the man who 'Found a Million-Dollar Baby (in a five-and-ten-cent store)'; so you should keep your chin up because 'Beyond the Blue Horizon (waits a beautiful day)', and all you had to do was to 'Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams (and dream your troubles away)'.

Occasionally, when she was down in the dumps, Mother would sing one of the embittered Depression songs, like 'Remember My Forgotten Man' or 'Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?'

In her heyday, my mother had had one of those quintessential symbols of the flapper 'Twenties, a ukulele. When the magic of short-wave brought Hawaii Calls! to our radio all the way from those distant islands, Anne-Marie would put on a grass skirt she had made from newspapers cut into long strips and she would hula with graceful, expressive hand movements while Mother strummed and fingered an imaginary ukulele and I imitated the falling whine of a Hawaiian guitar by humming in falsetto while blocking one nostril and flicking the other. Show Business!

Pennies from Heaven... These Foolish Things... The Way You Look Tonight... Goody-Goody... It's De-Lovely... The Music Goes Round and Round...

My mother always attacked the housework chores with unbounded energy. Saturday was laundry day in our apartment, and I worked with her in the bathroom while clothes boiled on the gas stove and filled the kitchen with steam. Bending over our old-fashioned claw-footed bathtub I would rub the sheets up and down a corrugated washboard with such reckless vigor that I always skinned a couple of knuckles, which would stiffen and sting for half the forthcoming week. Doing the laundry in those days was not just a matter of washing, rinsing, wringing out, then hanging on the line; the job involved several operations that are either combined today or dismissed as unnecessary. There was also bluing, bleaching, boiling and starching. Not only my school shirts and Anne-Marie's white school blouses got starched, but also the sheets and pillow cases. So a single item might be boiled, then bleached, then washed, then rinsed, then blued, then starched, then hung out to dry, then taken in, then sprinkled, then ironed, then folded away. My first encounter with the marvels of domestic technology designed to end housework drudgery was a new washboard we bought when our old one got too rusty to use. The corrugated scrub board was made of glass (no rust!), and this Nu-Mode Self-Soaping Glass Washboard (patent pending) introduced an innovation into the shallow wooden rectangle that held the bar of soap: holes had been drilled in the bottom board, allowing the soapy water to drain from the bar of Fels Naphtha and run down over the clothes being scrubbed on the corrugated glass. Nothing wasted. O, brave new world.

The only thing Mother couldn't do by herself was wring out the sheets because the strain of leaning over the edge of the bathtub always started a bout of coughing. So I used to help her, me twisting in one direction, she twisting in the other. When I was little, she was too strong for me and she would twist the sheet out of my grasp, which used to make me roar with frustration. We would coil the wrung-out sheets in the bottom of our clothes basket, which we would carry between us to the backyard to hang them out. Because Pearl Street traversed a hill that ran down to the river, the front windows of our apartment overlooked the street from a height of about ten feet, but we stepped out the door of our kitchen into a cement area that was four feet lower than the impermeable hard-pack of our sunless backyard. A central drain received the rainwater that cascaded down from beneath a rickety plank fence of weathered, dangerously splintery boards that separated our barren backyard from the alley where I used to play. One reel of our clothesline was attached to this fence, and the other was screwed into the frame of our kitchen door. Only people with first-floor apartments could hang out their washing while standing on the ground. Everyone else had to hang theirs from back windows using one line from the complex web of lines that looped off this way and that from the back of every building on the block. To hang out your clothes you had to bring them to your bedroom window, if you had a back apartment, or to the hall window on your floor if yours was a front apartment. You opened the window and leaned out to attach your wet clothes with clothespins, then you reeled them out far enough to attach the next pin, a difficult task if you were dealing with big things like sheets, which were always heavy with water, because no one on Pearl Street had a washing machine with rollers that squeezed the water out of sheets. Nor did our women want washing machines because they had all heard chilling urban factoids describing careless women who caught their fingers between the rollers and were dragged through the wringers up to the shoulder before their screams alerted passers-by. (Such are the dangers of being rich and so la-de-da as to need a machine to do your washing.) The reason the newspapers never carried stories about these ghastly accidents was that the big washing machine companies paid them to hush things up... or so we were assured.