The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (3 page)

Having investigated our new home, Anne-Marie and I were in the kitchen, looking at the bottle of green soda and thinking about that green cake. She sighed and said she was really, really, really hungry. Poor Anne-Marie. We hadn't eaten since breakfast, and food was more crucial to her sense of well-being than it was to mine or Mother's. When she drank hot chocolate, she would look into the bottom of her cup and hum with pure pleasure, and she got light-headed and frightened when she was hungry; but she hadn't said a word because she didn't want to spoil the Saint Patrick's Day party by eating just before it started. I went into the front room and woke Mother to tell her we were hungry. She dug into her change purse in that tight-fingered way that meant she was almost out of money and clawed out a quarter, and she sent me across to the cornerstore to get a loaf of bread and a small jar of peanut butter. Mother believed that peanut butter offered the best food value per unit of money you could buy. Meanwhile, she would locate the box containing our kitchen things and unpack it.

“But don't mess up the kitchen,” I reminded her. “We've got to keep everything ready for the party.”

I crossed the street and passed, head down, through the knot of older kids that had returned to loiter in front of Mr Kane's cornerstore.

“Hey, kid! Where you from?”

I didn't answer. I had developed the tactic of pretending to be lost in my own thoughts to avoid having to deal with people.

“What's the matter, kid? Your ears broke? I asked where you was from.”

He said 'axed' for 'asked'. I shrugged and reached out for the door to the shop, but a kid grabbed my collar and pulled me back, so I muttered, “Lake George Village.”

“What's that? George what? Talk up, why don't you?” He said 'tack' for 'talk' and 'ya' for 'you', and that troubled me. These local tribes didn't even speak our language. It wouldn't be long, however, before I learned to slip into the metallic, dentalized, slack-mouthed idiom of Northeastern street talk when I wanted to sound tough, and save my own accent for when I wanted to seem intelligent or polite.

“We're from Lake George Village,” I said more firmly than I felt.

“Where's that?”

“Up-state.”

“Hey, kid, got any money?” another asked. No.

“Why you going to the Jew's then? He don't give kids no credit.”

I tried to open the shop door, but someone grabbed my arm. “Come on, kid. Give us a nickel!”

“No!”

“You looking for a fist sandwich, kid?”

The door of the cornerstore opened. “Well, well, what have we here? A gathering of the neighborhood's best and brightest, is it? Our nation's hope for the future?” It was the shopkeeper wearing thick glasses and a green cloth apron. “And who are you, young man? Well, come in if you're coming in. I can't stand around here all day. Time is money, as the watchmaker said.”

I followed him into the store, hoping the kids would disperse before I had to go back home.

In response to my request for a small jar of peanut butter, Mr Kane took up a long wooden pole with metal fingers that were manipulated from a grip in the handle. He grasped the jar of peanut butter on a high shelf of his narrow shop, plucked it away, then opened the metal fingers and let it drop. As I gasped, he snatched up the hem of his apron to make a nest for receiving the jar with a plop, the deft performance of a man who had show business in his blood. I would learn before long that only bad breaks and the Depression had brought Mr Kane to North Pearl Street as a shopkeeper. And it wasn't show business he had in his blood, it was socialism.

“And what else, young man?”

“A loaf of bread,” I said, “...wait a minute. How much is the peanut butter?”

“For you? Fifteen cents. For others? A nickel and a dime.”

“Okay, and how much is a loaf of bread?”

“Eleven cents. One thin dime and a somewhat thicker penny... which isn't logical, but who said life has to be logical?”

“Do you have small loaves?”

“Eleven cents is the small loaf.”

“...Oh. I don't think I can...”

“Of course, day-old bread is only a nickel.”

“Do you have any day-old bread?”

He looked down on me, his eyes huge through thick lenses. “Well, I close up shop pretty soon. Tell you what; I'll sell you a loaf of tomorrow's day-old bread. How's that?”

I hated people giving us stuff or doing us favors, as though we couldn't make our own way. I hated it because my mother resented it so much. But...

“Okay.”

There was a shout outside as one boy 'sizzled' another by snapping his fingernails down across the kid's butt in a way that stings like hell. The sizzled kid took a swing at the other, who ran down the street, and a couple of kids ran after him, laughing and shouting. If I could only give them a little more time, maybe the rest of them would go away somewhere.

“We just moved in,” I told Mr Kane brightly.

“Yes, I saw you sitting over on the stoop of 238, surrounded by your possessions, like a band of Arabs in the desert. When business is slow, so it shouldn't be a total loss, I use my time to keep an eye on the street. After all, if I don't keep an eye on it, who will? I heard you tell one of your tormentors that you're from Lake George Village.”

“Oh, do you know Lake George Village?”

“Never heard of it. But if I concentrate I can almost...” He closed his huge eyes. “An image is coming to me through the mist. I see a small town. No, no, it's more like a village. And I see... I see water! Is it a river? The ocean? No, it's... a lake! And it's named after a person... wait a minute, wait a minute, it's coming to me. Is it Lake Nathan? No, not Nathan. Lake Samuel? No, not Sam—Ah! I've got it! George! It's Lake George, by George!”

I didn't mind his teasing. I could tell he loved to perform, and there were still a couple of kids outside the cornerstore, so I said, “We came to Albany to be with my father. He made a party for us.”

“A party?”

“A Saint Patrick's Day party. He's out getting us a green cake.”

“A green cake? H'm, I did see a man come out of 238 this morning. Dapper-looking gentleman, he was. And, you know, I remarked at the time that there was something in the way he walked that suggested a man on the trail of a cake. But I've got to be honest with you. From across the street I couldn't tell it was a green cake he was after. It could have been any color for all I knew.”

“Yes, we're waiting for him to come back for the party.”

A woman's voice from the back room called out in an exasperated whine, wanting to know if Mr Kane was going to close up or did he intend to stay open all night! His soup was getting cold!

“Ah. My life-burden calls.” He chanted back, “Coming, dear.”

“Well, I better be getting home.” I put my quarter up on the top of the glass candy case that served as a counter.

“Why don't I just put it on the slate until your welfare check comes in?”

“We don't have any—”

But he was already opening the scuffed and thumbed notebook that was his 'slate'. “Now, what name shall I put down? Mr and Mrs George, from the lake of the same name?”

My mother had punitively reverted to her maiden name after my father abandoned her with me still in her arms and Anne-Marie 'under her heart'. To avoid confusion and comment she had entered me in school as Jean-Luc LaPointe, not using my father's name. “LaPointe,” I said.

“...Mr and Mrs LaPointe,” he droned as he carefully printed the name at the top of a page. “The LaPointes from France, I assume?”

“My grandfather came from Canada. We're part Indian.”

“Oh-oh. Not one of those tribes notorious for scalping shopkeepers and making off with his penny candies!”

“No, not that kind.”

“Whew! Talk about your close calls! So that's fifteen cents for one jar of butter of the peanut variety...” he wrote, “...and five cents for a loaf of bread; size: small; age: one day old. Neonate bread, the bakers call it.” He closed the slate with a snap and waggled his thick eyebrows up and down above his huge eyes.

When I returned to our apartment with the bread, the peanut butter, and the quarter still intact, I had to explain to my mother that we were down on Mr Kane's slate and didn't have to pay until our check came in.

“What check?”

“I don't know.”

“And he gave you credit, just like that?”

“I guess he gives everybody credit. The boys said he's a Jew and he doesn't give credit, but he does. He has a book that he calls his slate.”

“H'm!” She didn't like the sound of that. She hated feeling beholden. Especially to strangers. “It'll be a hot day in hell before I go begging from strangers! What were you thinking of, Jean-Luc?”

“I don't know, I just—”

But she said never mind, she'd straighten things out in the morning.

We ate our peanut butter sandwiches at the kitchen table from which I had carefully cleared the paper plates and napkins so they could be replaced exactly where they had been for our Saint Patrick's Day party. I could tell that Mother didn't like my fussing that way. She was seething inside over something, so I kept my head down and didn't say anything. But Anne-Marie kept eyeing the bottle of lime soda. I told her we had to save it for the party, so everything would be green.

Mother sniffed. “Party! If I could find our bottle opener among all this crap, I'd open that soda quick enough. And I'd pour it down the sink!”

“But you can't. That'd spoil everything!”

“A big goddamn Saint Patrick's party! That's just like your father. You don't know his ways. I do. Always the big noise. The big show! He leaves us in the lurch for four years without so much as a word, and we don't know if he's alive or dead or what the hell, and now he's going to throw a big party, and that's supposed to make everything just fine and dandy! And the worst of it is that he's probably going to get away with it. Sure! When you kids are grown up, it won't be the years I've shrimped and saved and worked my fingers to the knuckle that you'll remember. It won't be how I've had to worry and fret, scared that I'd get real sick, and then what'd happen to you, I'd like to know. No, what you'll remember will be Ray's goddamn green Saint Patrick's Day cake! He runs away leaving me with all the work and worry, then he comes back with a big splash and we're all supposed to forgive him! Goddamn him to hell! And we're not even Irish!” But she shook her head and I knew that she was perversely proud of his cheek and élan. Who else would have had the brass to throw a party instead of saying he was sorry? Throughout the years we had been alone, whenever Mother got fed up with struggling to keep us in food and clothing, and especially when she was afraid she might be hospitalized with one of her lung attacks and social workers might come and take us kids away from her, she would give vent to her disappointment and fury. But after accusing him of being weak and irresponsible and selfish, she always ended up mentioning, in a give-the-goddamned-devil-his-due way, that he was a smooth dancer and a nifty dresser and that he had buckets of charm and what she called 'real class'. Ruby Lucile LaPointe wasn't the sort to fall for just any pair of trousers. No, sir.

My sister and I knew our father only from a photograph taken during their two-day honeymoon in New York City in 1929: a slim, handsome man in a white linen summer suit, the jacket held open by a fist on one hip to reveal a silk waistcoat, a straw boater tipped rakishly over one eye, his smile at once knowing and boyishly mischievous. After their honeymoon, he sent Mother back to the village of Granville to stay with her cousin Lorna and her husband while he went down to Florida to join up with friends who had let him in on a foolproof enterprise that would make him lots of money fast. Something to do with land speculation. He would return at the end of the summer and they could begin their life together. On Easy Street, Toots! Over the next two weeks, my mother received a letter from him every day, then one a week for the next month, then silence, and her letters to him were returned 'Address Unknown'. I was born nine months and six days after their marriage, and as soon as she was strong enough after a difficult birth (I heard the clinical particulars of this exceptionally long and arduous birth many times) we moved away from Lorna and her husband, who always grumbled about having to share his house and food with a cousin-in-law and her squalling brat. Mother got a job as a waitress in the summer resort where she had met my father, and we lived there until a letter from my father was forwarded to her by her cousin. He had run into some 'trouble' that led to his becoming an honored guest of the state of Florida for a year and a day. He hadn't written because there was nothing she could do to help him, so what was the point of distressing her? But he was a free man again, and a wiser one, and he was coming back north to meet some friends in Montreal who were letting him in on a sure thing. He stopped off on his way and spent one night with us at Lake George. I think I remember a man who came bearing a very big teddy bear, but I might only be remembering my mother's description of his arrival on our doorstep, tipsy, singing, and bearing an oversized teddy bear with which he staged a comic wrestling match to my giggling delight, ending up on the floor with the teddy bear triumphantly astride his chest as he begged for mercy. I wonder what happened to that teddy bear? Mother never said so, but I suspect she threw it out in a rage when he disappointed her again. The only time she ever spoke of this one-night visit she shook her head fatalistically and said, “All that man had to do was unbutton his suspenders and I got pregnant.” The deal in Montreal fell through and my father disappeared from sight for a month or two. Then another letter came asking us to meet him in Schenectady, where he had reason to believe he could pick up a little action. His letter went on to say, “I know what anxiety and worry you've been through, Toots. All I ask is a chance to make it up to you. And remember... 'You Were Meant for Me'.” This song title had little notes written around it. The citing of 'their song' and the coyness of '...as an honored guest of the State of Florida...' are typical of the letters from him I found among my mother's things after her death. She had saved every one of them, a total of nineteen, all written in a blend of jocular Runyonesque style, sudden sincerity, unabashed sentimentalism, and kittenish duplicity. In short, a con man's letters.