The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (21 page)

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 not—” 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 that 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 doors 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?”

“My mother's family is French Canadian. And part Indian.”

“John-Luke's a nice name.”

“Only my mother calls me Jean-Luc. Other people call me just Luke.”

“I've noticed that you always play alone.”

“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, I make up my own games, and other kids don't know the rules or the names of the people or... anything.”

“And you read an awful lot, don't you.”

How did she know that I read—? 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 'pro-fes-sor, pro-fes-sor, pro-fes-sor', which was one of my street names. My other street name was 'Frenchy' because my name was even more French-sounding since my mother had reverted to her maiden name, LaPointe, but with a Mrs, so as to justify us kids I suppose.

“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 live without a radio. So totally was my understanding of life linked to our old 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 and The Court of Last Resort for insights into the human condition. My favorite moment of the day was turning on the radio when I got back from school, and feeling the delicious anticipation of those five or so seconds of hum while the tubes warmed up, then there was the deep satisfaction of a familiar voice announcing one of the kids' adventure programs that my mother let me listen to for an hour every afternoon before homework. Standing on one leg before the radio, my head down, eyes defocused, I was totally mesmerized by what I was hearing and seeing. Seeing, because for me the actions and settings that radio evoked were real and tangible. Splendid and enthralling, but somehow 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; just a grim limbo I would escape from someday. Until then, I found solace in radio, and in my story games.

“I'm afraid of them,” Mrs McGivney said, offering me a second cookie, which I politely refused, then, because she continued to hold it out to me smiling, 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 in our row still had their gas fixtures in place, but the gas had long ago been cut off except for kitchen stoves and hot-water heaters. In some rooms the gas pipes had been used as conduits for the electric wires, so naked bulbs dangled from 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 cut-glass gas lamps on her walls, with bright brass keys to turn them on.

“Mr McGivney loves the gaslight,” she said. “He's always glad when it gets dark enough for me to turn it up.” She smiled at the un-moving old man, her eyes aglow with affection.

I looked over at him, sitting there with his pale eyes directed out the window, his face expressionless, and I wondered how she could tell he liked the gaslight. 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 that explained everything.

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. What 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 a sugar cookie. He loved my sugar cookies, not like another little boy I could mention.”

“I like your sugar cookies, 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, clinging 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 on my stoop for a while before going into our apartment where I knew my mother would be lying in her sick bed, bored and wanting company after a long siege of lung trouble that had left her smelling of mustard plaster and Balm Bengué, smells that combined with the floor wax of Mrs McGivney's apartment to evoke memories of the orphanage that Anne-Marie and I had been put into the previous winter, a grim institution out in the country, surrounded by a high chain-link fence with barbed wire stretched along the top, located in wintry fields of corn stubble that seemed infinitely bleak to city kids. The first day, one of the Brothers took me aside and told me that I should pray every night for my mother's recovery and, that failing, for her soul. 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 in that home forever.

We boys wore gray uniforms of a canvas-like material that was so stiff with starch that new kids were chafed at knee and elbow. We marched in silence to meals, classes and chapel, our lives punctuated by clamorous electric bells. We showered beneath jets of cold water and slept in cavernous unheated dormitories. The cold water and fresh air were supposed to 'harden us' against the rigors of life, but they only kept us in a permanent state of drippy noses, sore throats and earaches.

The first problem I met was going to the bathroom. There were urinals on the first floor and a long common trough in a shed beside the exercise field, but the only toilets were a bank of eight along the wall of the wash room at the end of the dormitory, and these not only lacked seats to mitigate the shock of cold porcelain but they were open to the view and the ridiculing comments of everyone, to the intense embarrassment of the boy uncomfortably perched and vulnerable. I used to wait until the small hours of the morning to slip into the deserted wash room and relieve myself. Fortunately, I was in the habit of being awake late into the night, but in the orphanage there was no street outside my window to absorb my interest, so I spent the time making up acronyms for memorizing names from history classes and lists from science and geography.

The dormitory rules were arbitrary and quixotic, and discipline was hierarchical, the older boys being in charge of the younger. This led to bullying and late-night punishments carried out in the shower room, where the offender was surrounded by a ring of older boys using sodden towels that hurt like hell but didn't leave bruises. The kid being punished stifled his cries because if the big boys got caught and punished for their illegal punishments, they would make his life a hell of secret punches, sneering taunts, and the torment of preference in that particular orphanage, Indian Burns, which consisted of grabbing a kid in a headlock and scrubbing his forehead or cheek with knuckles until the skin was raw and slippery with that clear fluid that becomes scab. These thin scabs identified their bearer as a victim and therefore fair game for further torment. Any passing bully could grab him and give him a few quick Indian Burns that would scrub off the scab and produce a new slippery rawness. Some kids always carried four or five of these blemishes on cheek and forehead that branded them as permanent victims and targets. Visitors from the social services identified these marks as impetigo and prescribed a bright blue medication, yet further marking and targeting. They didn't inspect the wounds closely for fear of catching impetigo.

Late one night when I had just finished going to the bathroom, four grinning older boys appeared at the doorway to the wash room, and the slack-lipped bully who was their leader told me that it was against the rules to go to the toilet late at night because that led to jacking off, which was a sin. He shrugged and sucked his teeth and said he guessed he'd just have to punish me, and he grabbed me and tried to give me an Indian Burn, but I responded with a rush of red rage that gave me the wiry strength to squirm out of his grasp and the next moment I had my fingers entwined in his hair and was banging his head on the tile floor until his eyes glazed over and he bit his tongue. His mouth filled with blood, and he was gagging and choking on it when his stunned buddies dragged me off him. They tended to him themselves, so he wouldn't 'get caught', and I returned to my cot in the darkened dormitory, my heart pounding with adrenaline, and with fear of reprisal, which was often threatened by word and gesture over the ensuing week. But nothing came of their threats, and they took out their anger on easier targets, the natural victims. In time I was able to relax, except in the chaos of the exercise yard where I felt in danger of being surrounded by enemies hidden in the screaming, madly romping throng.

But if social life at the orphanage was tense and menacing, the time spent in school was a blissful mitigation. For one thing, the classrooms were the only heated spaces, except for the infirmary. For another, while the Brothers were lax in protecting their charges from bullying, they took pride in their teaching, which was rigorous but caring. There were special classes for backward kids to help them catch up, and for those who did exceptionally well, there were accelerated classes with only five or six students. For the first time since Miss Cox I was not bored with schoolwork. One of the Brothers gave me an old grammar that had been published in 1898. I can still call up that book's smell of pleasing mustiness, and can feel the grainy greasiness of its worn fabric cover. I had always been fascinated by words, those little packets of sound that encased nuggets of meaning or feeling or attitude, like primitive insects in amber. That grammar book and those special accelerated classes in English helped my enjoyment of words to blossom into an interest in language: its structures, its shape; the machinery of grammar that binds words together, and the architecture of syntax that lets them spark meanings off one another like flint against steel.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note20#note20” ??[20]?

Inevitably, the favor I earned from certain of the Brothers because of my interest in language marked me as unforgivably 'different' in the eyes of the older boys, and this led to occasional tussles in meal queues or out in the anarchic exercise yard. Because of my involvement in these brief, covert and mostly silent skirmishes featuring elbows, knees and thumbs, and because I sometimes played the clown in class out of a pusillanimous desire to be one of the regular guys, I racked up more than my share of 'minutes', which were the general currency of punishment in the orphanage. The smallest unit of correction was five minutes. A Brother would give you a 'Five' for such venial transgressions as talking or fidgeting, or trying to sneak food out of the dining hall or failing to finish homework. Fighting always earned you at least a 'Ten', and a 'Fifteen' was the minimum for being cheeky or disrespectful. The heaviest penalty ever given for a single trespass was the two hours awarded, along with twenty smacks with the Paddle (which had holes drilled in it so it could move through the air faster), to a mentally deficient boy for masturbating in the shower in the presence of a score of other boys and the Brother in charge of our dormitory. The Brother could hardly believe his eyes as the oaf stood there, looking right at him, grinning as he performed his Onanesque outrage.