The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (31 page)

“She's nice.”

“What?”

“Your mother, she's nice. She's nice to my mother. Always says hello and stuff. So she's all right by me, your mother.”

“Ah... good.”

“I just wanted to tell ya.”

“Well... fine. I'm glad you told me. I... ah... well, I guess I better get along.”

“Yeah, you go ahead. But tell your mother she's okay by me.”

“I'll do that. See you around, Patrick.”

“See ya 'round, professor.”

When I got home I passed on Patrick Meehan's compliments to Mother, and she seemed pleased.

“He sounds like a nice boy.”

I stared at her, unbelieving. “No, Mother, Patrick Meehan is not a nice boy.”

“Oh, really?”

“No, he has this little problem. He hurts people, and one of these days he's going to kill someone.”

“Oh, I doubt that.”

I just shook my head. How could anyone living on North Pearl Street be so far out of contact with the brutal facts of life?

After fighting through the winter, 'courageous little Finland', as radio commentators always called her, finally surrendered to the Russians in March of 1940, that ominous-sounding year whose arrival I had dreaded. In April Germany occupied Denmark and swept up through the Norwegian ports. News broadcasts reported that German submarines were sinking many of the British ships carrying American goods to England. Then on May 10, after the months of inexplicable inactivity of the 'Phony War', the German army launched a lightning assault through the Netherlands into France, outflanking the totally useless Maginot Line.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note27#note27” ??[27]?

By the end of June 1940, most of France was occupied, and the southern part had become a neutral, collaborating state with Marshal Pétain at its head and Vichy as its capital.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note28#note28” ??[28]? A cross-channel invasion of England seemed imminent, but throughout July History held her breath as Germany digested the huge territories it had gobbled up, and England, the only enemy left, struggled to make up for decades of un-preparedness and years of appeasement. It was not until August that the Luftwaffe began massive bombing raids in an attempt to soften Britain up for invasion.

In America, the 1940 harvest of popular songs was so rich and varied that few of them remained long on the Hit Parade before they were crowded off by newcomers swarming in behind them.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note29#note29” ??[29]? Some of these songs came from the Big Bands, others from Broadway musicals or films, which also resurrected a few oldies. They were the songs you could hear at night, playing quietly from radios within apartments... quietly, not out of consideration for neighbors, but because our Irish believed that it cost more electricity to play a radio loudly. The summer sky above our jagged roofscape didn't darken until after eight o'clock, and streetlife on North Pearl extended late into the night; kids bawled and brawled as adults sprawled around the stoops listening to music from radios put out on window ledges, the women in faded cotton housedresses lifting their chins to let the evening breeze cool their moist necks; men in sticky undershirts sucked at quart bottles of ale, only rarely deigning to enter the women's conversation, and then only to tell their wives that if they didn't know what the hell they were talking about they should shut up, then going on to abuse the goddamned New Deal, the goddamned welfare system, or today's goddamned kids, the first for trying to force men into slave labor with the WPA, the second for being run by a tightfisted bunch of fancy-talking stuck-up college guys who, when it came right down to it, didn't know shit from Shinola, and the third for not showing proper respect for their elders. And it's all that Eleanor Roosevelt's fault! A woman shouldn't stick her nose in where it wasn't wanted!

Hot and airless though it was in our apartment by the end of a sweltering day, my mother wouldn't sit out on our stoop for a breath of evening air because she didn't want to have anything to do with 'these people' who had been slum-dwellers for generations, unlike us, who were only on Pearl Street because the Depression had ambushed us. She maintained that it was dangerous to consort with people who didn't come up to your standards of cleanliness, honesty, and self-respect because 'You can't tell a flock of birds by its feathers'. (Another of my mother's addled adages: in this case, perhaps the result of a high-velocity collision between 'you can't tell a book by its cover' and 'birds of a feather flock together'.) Instead, after our evening programs were over, she would click the radio off and say, “Let's get out of this dump!” and she'd take Anne-Marie and me for a walk downtown, where flashing signs in rippling patterns of small lightbulbs or in the newer bent neon tubes (how do they bend light like that?) spilled colors over the faces of the crowd, and we could smell the rich baritone aroma of chocolate from the open door of the Fanny Farmer shop as we passed on our way from store to store, window-shopping and fantasizing about all the fine things we'd own and all the interesting things we'd do when we got out of Albany. Sometimes we'd meet the Peanut Man on the street in front of the Planters Peanut Shop, a sandwich-board man wearing a huge peanut with a top hat and monocle and thin black-clad legs sticking out the bottom. He offered passers-by free spoonfuls of freshly roasted salted peanuts. The three of us would queue up for our samples, and sometimes Anne-Marie, who had reached an age at which she was fully aware of the charm of her long blonde hair and large innocent blue eyes, would go back for a second spoonful, although we knew you were supposed to take only one. I envied her brass, but I never dared to try for seconds for myself. A refusal would have been so humiliating that I would have done or said something rash and yet more humiliating.

By the time we had threaded our way home through quiet side streets it would be after ten o'clock, and Mother and Anne-Marie would go to bed, but I would sit in the dark, watching the street, my window open the couple of inches its warped frame would allow to catch the breeze. On a typical summer night, a knot of teenaged boys would have gathered next to the cornerstore on the strip of hard-packed waste ground that Mr Kane sardonically called 'his garden'.

Girls who had just that summer disdained hopscotch and jump-rope as kids' stuff would detach themselves from the giggling gaggle that by ancient tradition collected two stoops down from the cornerstore, and they would stroll up past the boys on the corner, always in protective twos. Pretending to be lost in earnest conversation, a pair of girls (usually a prettier, more confident, more developed one and her shyer, plainer, fatter friend who got vicarious thrills from her desirable friend's love life) would run the gauntlet of ogling, wisecracking boys, the shy one gripping her friend's hand as they hurried by. Once they reached the corner, there was nothing to do but undergo the indignity of being looked at, evaluated and commented on again as they returned to the knot of girls clustered around the stoop. The brassy one would sometimes engage the boys in racy single-entendre badinage, then upon returning, she would recount her encounter to breathlessly admiring friends.

"...so he goes: How about it? So I go: How about what? And he goes: You know what. So I put on my ritzy voice and I go: I beg your pardon I'm sure, but I certainly do not know to what you are referring to. Why don't you inform me of it, if you're so smart. (Oh, hon, you didn't!) I did so. And I turn my nose up and start to walk away, but he grabs me by the arm, so I go: Don't handle the merchandise until it's paid for. (Oh, hon, you didn't!) Well that stops him cold, so he goes: How much? And I come right back: More than you'll ever have! (You didn't!) I did so. And he goes: Come on, give a guy a break. So I go: I'll have my cousin break your arm, that's the only break I'll give you. So his pals laugh at him, and I walk away. (Oh, hon! You didn't!)

Listening to the explicit lyrics of this primitive mating chant through my open window, I was repelled by the banality and stupidity of it all, for I was a crisp-minded eleven-year-old while these salivating canines nosing one another's crotches were teenagers... worlds, entire cultures, infinities beneath me. There was one thing I was absolutely sure of: when I was a year or two older, nothing in the world would make me behave in that undignified way, sniffing around girls like a dog. I was, of course, wrong.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note30#note30” ??[30]?

I was not spared the baffling onset of testosterone madness, for within six months of the night I sat at the window, eavesdropping on that girl's neo-nubile prattle and feeling superior to her crude mating rituals, I fell victim to the nameless urges and surges of desire. I was eleven years old when I first fell in love, a hesitant, secret love untainted by desire. Well, no desire that I recognized as such. Well... not at first, anyway. She was, after all, a nun.

Love on Pearl Street

(or: Brigid Meehan's Left Breast)

Although I was only eleven when I first fell in love, I was not totally unequipped to grapple with the mysteries of that glorious affliction of heart and groin. Not only did I know where babies came from and how they got there, I even had inklings of the nature of romantic love.

First, the babies and the ballistics. I already knew the fundamental mechanics of copulation because my remarkably modern mother believed it was healthiest to respond as honestly as she could to questions posed by me or my sister. I listened soberly, and with growing incredulity, to her frank description of human love-making. I couldn't believe it. Why would two sane people want to do that... especially people who claimed to like each other? Responding to my doubts and my basic squeamishness, my mother went to some lengths to assure me that love-making was a pleasurable thing, indeed the most sublime act that two people in love could share. I remained dubious. Why should I believe love-making was all that sublime and beautiful when Nature herself held so dim a view of the act that She obliged us to perform it with our pissing gear? If body space was so tight that Nature had to double up on functions, why didn't She have us smell with our fingertips or hear with our elbows—anything to save some special part of the body for the performance of this sublime act? (Perhaps the belly button, which seemed to have no very urgent function assigned to it.) Something wasn't right here. Either my mother was wrong about the loftiness of love-making, or Nature was playing a cruel joke.

In addition to my mother's explanations, with their odd blend of medical terms like 'tube', 'egg' and 'channel' and romantic words like 'love', 'tenderness' and 'caress', I had other sources for appreciating the physical aspects of human relations. There were, for instance, Miss LaMonte's solid thighs and ample breasts.

A couple of months after I got my paper route, Mother decided that the best way to 'invest' the extra money that began to accumulate in our matchbox Dream Bank was to start Anne-Marie's tap-dancing lessons.

“It would be a dying shame if some Hollywood talent scout passed your sister up because she didn't know how to tap dance. You know what they say: Opportunity only knocks on wood!”

Well, I couldn't argue with that, although the only reason there were a few dollars in the Dream Bank was that Mother had been having a run of good health for the last few months. What if she broke down when our savings were all gone?

Anne-Marie took tap-dancing lessons in the basement studio of the LaMonte Dance Academy (Tap, Acrobatic, Ballet and Latin American—Hula a Specialty) where lines of panting little girls shuffle-ball-change-ball-change-ball-change'd their hearts out, their curls bouncing to the rhythm of an upright piano pounded by a hoarse-voiced old woman who squinted through threads of smoke rising from an eternal cigarette in the corner of her mouth: Miss LaMonte's mother. The dance routines always ended with little curtseys and broad smiles, as the girls pointed their forefingers up under their dimpled chins, for they were all preparing themselves to step into Shirley Temple's tap shoes, should anything untoward happen to America's little sweetheart, God forbid. Group lessons cost a dollar and a half, and Anne-Marie took them two times a week, which absorbed most of what my paper route took in. When Miss LaMonte decided that my sister's exceptional talent deserved an additional semi-private lesson each Friday evening, the total rose to five dollars a week. But my mother had faith in Anne-Marie's artistic gifts and in her own boundless determination. To supplement my paper route, she got fairly regular fill-in work at a chop house on lower State Street (on the QT, of course, so the welfare people didn't reduce our allowance). Buying Anne-Marie's tap shoes might have presented an insurmountable problem, but Miss LaMonte had an arrangement with the owner of a shoe store down on South Street whose sign was a splendid example of first-generation Jewish commercial rhetoric: Classy Shoes, Inc. We could buy the tap shoes on time, a quarter a week, the same terms as those under which we had bought our Emerson. In fact, the A-One Pawn Shop was only a couple of doors down from Classy Shoes, Inc.

I accompanied my mother to the monthly recitals intended to showcase the talents of the dancers and to give them a chance to get used to 'working an audience'. Miss LaMonte always danced a final solo number to inspire by example. We would sit on bentwood chairs among other admiring mothers and a scattering of awkward, reluctant brothers with wet-down hair and tight ties the narrow ends of which always ended up longer than the wide. Miss LaMonte was loud, glittering, energetic and very blonde (but this was acceptable in one who had received 'professional New York legitimate stage training'), and her ample breasts sloshed within the stiffened cups of her low-cut dancing costume. She admitted to being 'no chicken' but her legs were still good! she would laughingly assure the mothers, slapping her muscular thigh and stunning them with a huge smile, her painted lips bigger than her mouth. I'm sure the mothers had no idea of the role Miss LaMonte's slapped thigh and tidal breasts played in the fledgling fantasies of the wet-haired, tight-tied brothers, who stiffened on their bentwood chairs when she made her post-recital round of the mothers, bending over each one in turn to give a few words of praise and encouragement (with a breast nearly in the brother's face!). The boy would stare straight ahead, riveting his eyes on Miss LaMonte's perspiring neck, never letting them drop to her breasts, not because he didn't want to look at them, but because he didn't want to be seen looking at them. And often a boy whose mother had just been visited by Miss LaMonte's breasts would catch the eye of another boy, and the message 'Jeez!' would pass as both boys swallowed and drew deep breaths. Miss LaMonte assured each mother in turn that her daughter had 'star quality', which gave her a good chance of making it, provided that she kept on with her lessons and, of course, that she got 'the breaks'. Not wanting to raise any false hopes, Miss LaMonte frankly admitted that you couldn't make it in show business without 'the breaks', no matter how gifted your teacher was. After the recital, the mothers would gather out on the sidewalk, hollowly complimenting the efforts of other mothers' awkward offspring, and assuring one another that Miss LaMonte knew talent when she saw it, believe you me! Then we would walk home, my sister's glittering, hand-made costume covered by a long, second-hand winter coat. She was allowed to wear her costume and make-up until she got home, just in case a talent scout happened to pass by. After all, that was the way most of the Hollywood stars had been discovered, wasn't it?