The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (63 page)

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30. '...I was, of course, wrong' (p. 202)

Although girls mature socially earlier than boys, they enter the hormonal stage of puberty a little later, and much more gracefully. This isn't generally recognized because the earliest stage of a girl's passage into womanhood is recognized for what it is, while a boy's is not. In the northern hemisphere, girls are seldom younger than thirteen when they fall victim to those sudden blushes, those clumsy attempts at sophistication, that coltish gangliness, those nameless reveries, and that crippling self-consciousness that herald the physical changes that will soon explain all. Ex-tomboys giggle, ex-hoydens flush with unaccountable confusion, and there is a sudden desire to have a best friend to share secrets with. All in all, save for the discomfort of some of the physical changes and a lingering regret at the loss of easy-going, sexless childhood, the dawn of a girl's coltish passage into womanhood is a charming thing that knowing adults smile upon.

Not so with boys. Their reactions to the early trickles of testosterone that begin at the age of nine or ten, long before there is any change in voice, appearance of body hair, or distention of testicles to inform him of the cause of the madness that freezes his imagination, destroys his calm, shrinks his horizons and sours his temperament. First, he becomes insanely energetic and inflicts free-flowing aggression on everything that can be broken, shattered, twisted, climbed, mastered, threatened, bullied, buried, bent, burnt, bruised or busted. The observer of these raging aberrations would be hard pressed to recognize them as the dawn of sexual maturity. No awkward coltish grace here, no charming blushes, no sudden shyness; only bafflement and anger as the boy, still clinging to the rituals and rhythms of childhood, is dragged snarling and pouting into manhood, for which he is not ready and with which he cannot cope. It is little wonder that men revert to their interrupted childhoods as often as they can: going on hunting trips with the guys and all the other variants of playing 'guns' and 'cowboys-and-Indians', or converting their daily highway commute into a grand prix competition, or watching televised sports from a couch, masses of infantile high-calorie non-foods at hand, or forcing vacation fun-and-antics upon their reluctant families, or remembering their army duty and barracks bawdiness as the 'best years of their lives', or buying unneeded household gadgets they want to play with, or any of the hundreds of childish behaviors that girlfriends think attractively childlike, until they become wives and find them irritatingly childish.

At the age of eleven or twelve, boys discover a need to bring their existence to the attention of girls of their own age, whom they try to impress by making as much noise and nuisance as possible. They seek opportunities for safely-disguised physical contact, such as throwing the girl against her school locker or knocking her books out of her arms, then they are baffled when their wooing fails to win the girl's heart (which has, of course, been given to an older man... of fourteen or fifteen). Eventually, the first physical changes appear to suggest the cause of their unaccountable insanity, particularly those sudden, spontaneous erections that cause them considerable local discomfort and social embarrassment until they learn to walk from class to class with their spiral notebooks held at improbable angles. But although the sexual manifestations of their puberty come later than the behavioral ones, once arrived these are dominant and constant. I recently read that the average adolescent boy thinks of sex seven times each hour*.

Once the juices of desire start sloshing and sizzling through his blood, a boy begins to act like a fool and his fantasies resemble the out cuts of a low-budget pornographic film. While girls are engrossed in clothes and cosmetics, boys are thinking of sex. While girls yearn for cosseting and gentle words, boys are thinking of sex. While girls dream of love and romance, boys are thinking of sex. While girls anticipate homes and nest making, boys are thinking of sex. While girls are mentally dressing babies up in soft little...

From the age of eleven or twelve until they reach their mid-sixties men have their serenity, even their dignity, threatened by jolts of testosterone so constantly and to such a dangerous degree that their lives have been insightfully described as 'fifty-five years spent chained to a madman'.

* How do sociologists know things like this? Surely they don't pass out questionnaires. Any boy worthy of the name would lie on such a questionnaire, some in one direction, and some in the other. Of course you know that most statistics cited by writers are blatant fictions designed to lend an aura of scientific precision to their casual observations... 76.4% of them, to be exact.

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31. '...in comparison to children of today' (p. 206)

The kids of North Pearl were under-educated, they lacked refinement, and they were tough by anyone's standards (several of us did time in reform school and prison, one for manslaughter), but our speech was notably less vulgar than that of most middle-class children today. 'Hell' and 'shit' were common expletives, but 'Christ' and 'God' were rare, with our Catholic worries about taking the name of the Lord our God in vain. 'For Christ's sake!' was an exception. Everyone, even the devout Mrs Dwyer, used this general intensifier, assuming it to fall within the category of pious supplications. I was sufficiently troubled about 'Jeez', which I knew was a sanitized version of Jesus, to decide to give it up. And anyway, Jeez was kid-talk, and I was growing out of all that.

I occasionally saw 'fuck' written on the wall of a public toilet and knew what it meant, but I never heard that word spoken aloud in all my years on Pearl Street. It wouldn't be until I was three thousand miles away in California that I first heard the word aloud. One boy on our block, a kid who had a violent father, a sluttish mother, nits and impetigo, used to say 'frig'. But he was the only one who used even this laundered version of 'fuck', and he did it because of the blood-freezing effect the word had on a potential opponent, which just goes to show how rare it was.

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32. '...the ardent alchemy of Brigid Meehan's left breast' (p. 210)

A couple of months after that sacrament of ritual passage in Brigid Meehan's hall, I was looking through a book I had nicked from the return cart at the library and carried up to my hidden nest above the sighing, gurgling neo-Gothic radiator, and in it I came across a reproduction of a painting of Agnes Sorel, mistress of Charles VII and epitome of late medieval beauty: a bland, pealed face, large liquid eyes, a small pointed chin, an extravagantly high forehead obtained by plucking back the hairline. She had posed with one perfect, girlish breast revealed. I was fascinated by that breast, the first white breast I had ever been able to examine at length. (In the library's back issues of National Geographic I had seen black breasts of all shapes, sizes, ages, and degrees of flaccidity or pertness, but black breasts were displayed for their educational value and were assumed to be neither provocative nor stimulating.) As I gazed at Agnes Sorel's breast I could imagine what it would feel like if I reached out and touched the small taupe-pink nipple with my fingertip. Because Agnes' breast was small and firm, not long and soft like Brigid Meehan's, I couldn't have held it on my palm. Although the aristocratic Mlle. Sorel's girlish five-hundred-year-old breast was admirable in every way, it was the memory of Brigid Meehan's functional, work-a-world breast that was eventually transferred to my dreams about Sister Mary-Theresa, dreams in which the ineffably complex feeling of that thick, warm liquid-in-a-silken-sack spreading over my palm blended with Sister Mary-Theresa's face beneath her winged wimple coming closer and closer to mine until we began to rise into the night sky... towards nameless ecstasy... towards inexpungable sin.

A last word about Brigid Meehan's left breast:

I was wandering through our back alley one hot Sunday afternoon in late summer, my last summer in Albany, when I happened to notice that the grime-crusted window of one of the long-abandoned stables was broken. By reaching through the broken pane carefully, carefully to avoid cutting my wrist on the glass, I was able to slip back the wooden slide that secured the door. I stepped in and closed the door behind me.

The silence was sudden and heavy. A pallid sunbeam slanted through the dirty window and held in its beam motes of dust that had been set a-swirl by my entry into the still, stale air. As my eyes dilated, an old draught wagon with iron-rimmed wheels emerged from the gloom beyond the sunbeam; there was some dusty straw in the mangers, and I realized that it had only been some thirty years since these stables were in daily use by the thousands of horses that had been Albany's principal means of transportation. The automobile had rushed into dominance so quickly and so totally that all traces of the horse vanished, forgotten, from America's inner cities, where blacksmiths soon became auto mechanics and their forges were transformed into auto repair shops, just as hundreds of public stables became gas stations while private ones were transformed into garages.

Over in the corner of the stable was an old piece of canvas over a mound of hay, and on it there was something yellow. It was the knitted toque that Brigid Meehan used to wear summer and winter. So this must be the place the boys who hung around the mouth of the alley took Brigid to use her when sexual urgency temporarily rendered them sperm-blind to the danger of Patrick Meehan's insane rage. She must have left it behind. I didn't pick it up, didn't touch it. A shiver of premonition made me leave quickly, and once I was back out in the eye-dazzling sunlight I soon forgot the discovery, and that dilapidated stable with its baritone aroma of ancient horseshit and its eddy of straw dust swirling in a beam of sunlight retreated into the deep recesses of my memory to emerge only when, about forty years later, I learned what eventually happened in that back alley.

I was waiting for transportation from the lobby of a fashionable hotel in San Francisco, when I was approached by a woman who spoke my name interrogatively. “You don't recognize me, do you,” she accused half-coquettishly. When I confessed that I didn't, she informed me that she was from the old block, North Pearl Street! She told me her name, and I could place where her family had lived, but I couldn't separate her from the horde of runny-nosed kids a year or two behind me in age, metamorphosed as she was into a professional woman 'power-dressed' in a suit of blue serge pinstripe. In the course of an exchange of 'Whatever happened to old... ', she told me that Kathleen Gogarty had become a nun and had gone to serve God in Africa. Then she asked if I remembered poor Brigid Meehan, and before I could answer she said that a year or so after I left North Pearl, Brigid had been found murdered in one of those old stables in the alley behind my apartment house. “Do you remember that back alley”

The thought of Brigid Meehan dead in my back alley rushed me back in time and place, and I remembered seeing her yellow knit toque on a pile of hay in an disused stable where dust motes swirled in the...

“...Luke?”

“...I'm sorry, I was... What did you say?”

“I asked if you remember that alley.”

“Yes... I remember it.”

After a couple of minutes the crisp, busier-than-thou businessperson glanced at her watch and said she had a really big meeting on. We agreed that we really must get together and talk about the old days, she no doubt dreading that I might take her up on that as much as I dreaded that she might do the same to me. I sat in the lobby for a time, thinking about Brigid Meehan... her silly yellow toque... her insane brother... her long left breast... so silken and soft in the dark of her hallway that day my mother talked her mother out of her crucifixion between stove and back door. Dead in that abandoned stable. I guessed that one of the men who used her wanted to make sure that she didn't tell Patrick on him.

...Brigid Meehan... Pearl Street...

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33. '...for fear of missing the resolution.' (p.213)

Although each episode of 'First Nighter' (? HYPERLINK “http://www.trevanian.com/radio/radio.htm” ?explore this here?) had different characters and events, the series had a feeling of continuity because they used the same lead actors week after week. At first these were June Meredith and Don Ameche, but eventually Barbara Luddy replaced Miss Meredith, then Les Tremayne replaced Mr Ameche, only to be replaced, in turn, by Olan Soulé. (Some of these spellings are guesses; this was radio, after all.) My mother's loyalty did not survive all these changes, in part because she particularly loved Don Ameche's creamy baritone voice (and his brother Jim's, too).

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34. '...distinguish the one from the other' (p. 213)

One of my mother's favorites was “Stella Dallas”, the continuing story of a woman who sacrificed everything for her little girl, Laurel (whom Stella called Lolly-Baby), even to the extent of letting her be brought up by rich people who made her into an uppity, refined being whose social class was far above Stella's. Poor self-sacrificing Stella lurched from tragedy to tragedy, but her problems and laments were so similar that six months could pass between illnesses serious enough to nail a boy to his bed where he was so bored that he'd even listen to soap operas. I always had the feeling that I had not missed anything over my six-month absence, except perhaps some of the names had changed and Lolly-Baby needed to be saved from yet another no-account guy.