The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (11 page)
Read The Crazyladies of Pearl Street Online
Authors: Trevanian
Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Coming of Age
Mother threw an anxious glance at me then said tentatively to Mrs Meehan, “A-a-h... good afternoon.”
Mrs Meehan grinned and nodded, then she turned and shuffled back to her stoop, where she was met by her flock of babbling children.
We walked on in silence; mine stunned, Mother's thoughtful, Anne-Marie's worried. After half a block, Mother said, “I'll bet I know what that was all about. I wished a good afternoon to her for no reason... just because I was feeling good. But no one ever talks to the Meehans, so she didn't expect it and didn't know what to make of it. That's why she stared at me like that. But after a while, it sank in that I was just being friendly, so she came running after us to say good afternoon back to me.”
“Maybe so. But it could also have something to do with her being a nut.”
“She's not a real Meehan, you know. She's the only one of them who isn't. One of the Meehan men found her in a loony bin where he was doing time, and he brought her home... or so Mrs Kane says. But that could be just a lot of hooey. You've got to take everything an old gossip like Mrs Kane says with a dose of salts.? HYPERLINK ”file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm“ \l ”note8#note8“ ??[8]? You know what I bet? I bet Mrs Meehan was brought up around polite people, and she misses it.”
“But she's the craziest of all the Meehans,” I said. “You don't want to get mixed up with her.”
“She's not dangerous, poor thing.”
Anne-Marie and I exchanged glances. We weren't thinking about danger. We knew that if Mother started having anything to do with the Meehans, the block's gossips, who already thought she was far too 'different', would be confirmed in their belief that she was a borderline crazylady.
After that day, whenever my mother walked downtown, even if she was on our side of the street, the Meehan kids would rush indoors screaming, “The Missus! The Missus!” And Mrs Meehan would appear on her stoop, wiping her hands on a rag or pushing hair out of her eyes. She would grin and wave at Mother, who would call “Good morning!” or “Good afternoon!” and Mrs Meehan would return the greeting, beaming with pleasure as she watched Mother walk down the street for a while before returning to her warren, her day brightened.
Through determination and invention Mother managed to keep us healthy on $7.27 a week, but when it came to providing the little extras that make life worth living, she had to find occasional part-time work as a waitress, regardless of the risk to her health. The first, and by far the most important, of these life-embracing extras was an extravagance, a beloved extravagance: the Emerson radio that became our principal contact with the great external world of learning and life and love and laughter. One night when she was walking home from a late shift in a hash house where she'd been filling in, my mother spotted the Emerson in the darkened window of a pawn shop on the corner of South Street and Herkimer. The next day, a Sunday, the three of us were returning from Washington Park where there was a wooden four-person 'gondola' swing that we could queue up for, then ride it until our arms and legs were heavy with pumping and our heads were light with swooping through the air. Mother brought us home the long way around, down State Street to the closed A-One Pawn Shop, where we stood before the window looking at the radio and imagining all the drama, comedy, music and news that could come pouring out at the click of a switch. We knew about this because we'd had the use of a friend's radio for a month during our last summer at Lake George Village and we'd spent several hours each day listening to programs coming to us from as far away as Glens Falls and Schenectady. I wondered how much the shopkeeper would ask for this radio, considering that its walnut cabinet was cracked and some of the inlaid bits were missing. I liked its reliable, old-fashioned key-hole shape and its upside-down face with an arched dial of a mouth above two turn-knob eyes. If it had been newer it would probably have been Bakelite molded into that universal design idiom of the 'Thirties: Streamlining. This smooth, swept-back look was logical for automobiles and locomotive engines, but throughout the 'Thirties streamlining was applied to all kinds of products and articles, even the least appropriate: toasters, lamps and handbag clasps were streamlined, as well as bookends, exit signs, money clips, barrettes for girls' hair, ashtrays, facades of buildings... all sorts of things were designed to come flying at you through the air. No wonder it was a nervous decade.
Mother said we were lucky the radio's cabinet was old and cracked because that would be useful in bargaining with the pawnbroker, and she knew how to haggle with these people. You had to stand your ground and—
Just then a spring bell above the shop door ping'd as the door opened. “There's something?” asked the pawnbroker, an old man with a thousand years of craft and suffering in his face and twice that much complaint in his voice. In height, he was about halfway between me and my mother, and he wore a woman's apron and dust bonnet, presumably his wife's. I guessed he had been cleaning up his merchandise. My mother told him we were just looking.
“Looking's free. Enjoy.” And he turned to go back into the shop. My mother tipped me a wink and asked the man how much a pair of binoculars in the window was. (Ah, she doesn't want him to know she's really interested in the radio. Crafty.)
The old man smiled at her. “I could have sworn you were looking at the radio. Quality merchandise. Absolutely guaranteed to carry the finest programs available on the airwaves. And all in English for ease of use.”
“Radio?” my mother asked, puzzled. “I didn't notice any... oh, you mean that one down there? The old one with the broken cabinet?”
“The crack lets the sound out more freely.”
“How much?”
“A bargain at nine dollars.”
Mother sniffed a note of laughter and turned away.
“But for you, lady, seven dollars fifty cents.”
Mother shook her head and made a puffing sound.
“Lookit, lady, I'll tell you what. Because it's Sunday and because I'm not officially open for business and because you're my only customer and because I like the look of your kids and because I'm too softhearted for my own good, I could make it six seventy-five. A penny less and I'm in the poorhouse.”
“Six dollars even.”
“Oy ayoy! Such a stubborn lady! All right, six dollars. But my wife's a proud woman. She's going to hate living in the poorhouse. By the way, we're talking cash here, aren't we?”
“I get paid at the end of the week.”
“You're saying you don't have the cash. Why are you wasting my time like this, lady? What did I ever do to you?”
“I'll have the money at the end of the week.”
“Lady, I just can't...! Oh, all right, all right! Come back with the cash at the end of the week. The radio will be waiting for you.”
“Yes, but I need—”
“Don't even think it, lady.”
“There's lots of good programs on Sundays, and I—”
“I asked you to don't even think it.”
“My kids would love to listen to—”
“You're thinking it, even though I begged you not to!”
“I could give you a dollar right now, and the rest when I get paid at the end—”
“Lookit, lady, I don't know you from Adam. Or Eve either, for that matter.”
“I've never cheated anybody in my life!”
“Who's talking cheating? A trolley car could hit! The world could come to an end! Things happen!”
“I could make it two dollars down. That's every last cent of my tip money.”
“Help, somebody. A man's being robbed here!”
“What do you say?”
“What do I say? I say I'm being robbed. Tell those kids not to look at me like that. Why did I open the door? All right, two dollars down, four fifty at the end of the week.”
“We agreed on six dollars even.”
“That was the cash price. The robbery price is six fifty.”
“All right, it's a deal.”
“My wife's going to kill me. Then they'll send her to prison. Fast the poorhouse, then prison.”
As we walked home, me carrying the Emerson proudly and Anne-Marie green-lipped from sucking a striped candy stick the shopkeeper had given her, my mother muttered, “You see how he jacked up the price on me at the last minute? They're all alike.”
I couldn't believe it. After the way she had whittled him down like that, and the way he'd let us walk away with his radio for only two dollars down. But that's how she'd been brought up to see things.
We tried to work out a schedule for listening to the radio so we could hear all the best programs without wasting electricity. But in the end we listened greedily and without method because radio not only brought drama, comedy and world events into our lives, but we were also avid followers of the fortunes of the popular tunes that were featured on the weekly Your Lucky Strike Hit Parade. We would cheer the climb of our favorites up the hit-parade ladder, then lament their inevitable decline into the shadows of history.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note9#note9” ??[9]?
As it turned out, the pawnbroker was right when he said that things happen. For one thing, he didn't get his four fifty at the end of that week as we had promised. Mother fell ill from late hours and overwork, and the manager of the restaurant held back part of her wages because she hadn't worked the full week. At twenty-five cents a week, it took us more than four months to pay off the four fifty we owed for the radio, and that quarter was enough to strain our budget to the extent of at least one extra day on potato soup each week. But it was worth it. A radio! At the time we got ours, only a few people on our block had radios. When President Roosevelt made a Fireside Chat to the nation we radio owners would put our receivers on the sills of our front windows and turn the volume up, so the people who gathered on the pavement could hear. I used to look down benevolently on the sidewalk listeners we were informing with our Emerson, and I would keep my hand on the volume knob, so everybody knew who was in charge of things.
Each Saturday afternoon Mother would give me a quarter and I would walk all the way down to South Street and Herkimer. The spring bell above the door of the A-One Pawn Shop would ping as I entered, and the old man would always greet me with the same words: “Ah! So you and your mother haven't run off to Mexico with my radio yet, eh?”
And I would always respond, “No, still here, Mr A-One.”
“Mr A-One! That's a hot one! Such wit! You should tell jokes on that radio you stole from me on false pretenses.” He would take the quarter and write out my receipt on a scrap of paper which I would put into my shoe for safety because my mother carefully saved all the receipts. You can't tell with those people.
He would tell me how much we still owed; I'd say: See you next week, Mr A-One; he'd say: Such wit; and I'd open the ping-ing door and start the long walk back home, thinking about the special Saturday night comedy hour with Amos 'n Andy and Fred Allen's Town Hall Tonight both of which could make my mother laugh until tears stood in her eyes.
It is difficult for the modern reader to appreciate the effect of radio upon the pre-television audience, because the functions and the impact of radio differed from those of television in fundamental ways, not the least of which was the fact that the radio audience was innocent and receptive to a degree unimaginable today.
Introduced on the eve of the Age of the Consumer, television quickly became a throw-away narcotic for the reality-stunned. Its messages bypass the censorship of the brain and are injected directly into the viewer's central cortex. It is a babbling background irritant to modern life, always present, never significant, except to the lonely, the dim, and the damaged. Radio, on the more joyful hand, engaged us, busied our imaginations, and obliged us to paint its images on the walls of our minds. On radio, a handsome man was your personal image of a handsome man, and a brave woman was your idea of a brave woman, and a beautiful sunset was your sunset, your beauty. News broadcasts were gritty, immediate and potent, science was fascinating and significant, humor was side-splitting, drama touched our hearts, and the adventure programs, particularly those directed at children, were the very stuff of daydreams: absorbing, involving, challenging, frightening and totally satisfying. (If you were a boy, that is. It must be admitted that radio drama arrived in an era when the female character was still limited largely to romantic and domestic settings, which is too bad, because few women look back on radio with the affection men feel, and one cannot blame them.) I used to stand before our Emerson for hours, one foot hooked behind the other ankle, my eyes defocused, thoughtlessly tearing up little bits of paper as my imagination battened on the radio as on an unending flow of ambrosia, food for the mind and the soul that sustained you when you needed support, exercised you when your emotions or intellect were flabby and cosseted you when you needed rest and escape.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note10#note10” ??[10]? And radio was a liberator. For me, radio was the quickest way out of North Pearl Street. And that was important because I was chilled by a nagging fear that I might end up on public support the rest of my life until, like most of the people on my block, I became so spiritually enfeebled that I lost all dignity, grit and ambition and came to view the dole not only as a necessary condition of existence but as a basic civil right.