The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (5 page)

“You're my good right hand, Jean-Luc. I don't know what I'd do without you.”

She kissed me good-night and turned out the bathroom light, and the crepe paper chains disappeared into the dark of the high ceiling.

I lay on my daybed in the front room, which never got totally dark because a streetlamp cast a diagonal slab of light from one corner to the other. I was looking up at the ceiling, intrigued by how, each time a car passed out on the street, the edge-ghost of its headlights slid through and around the chandelier rosette in the middle of which a single lightbulb dangled from a paint-stiffened wire. I lay there for what was, for a kid, a long time, maybe ten minutes, until I thought Mother was asleep, then I eased out of bed stealthily and went to the window to watch for my father's arrival. He'd be the one coming down the street carrying the string-tied baker's box with a green cake that he'd finally found after going from one end of Albany to the other, and I would sneak out onto the stoop and beckon him in, putting my finger across my lips to signal him to walk on tiptoes, and we'd put the cake in the middle of the kitchen table and open the green soda carefully, so the pffffft sound wasn't too loud, and we'd get everything ready, then we'd go into the bedroom and wake Mother and Anne-Marie, and they'd be surprised and all smiles and...

I heard a faint sound from the back bedroom. I knew that sound, and hated it. My mother was crying softly to herself, as she did only when the bad breaks and the loneliness and ill health built up until they overwhelmed her. She cried when she was afraid, and the thought of my mother being afraid frightened me in turn, because if that buoyant, energetic woman couldn't handle whatever the problem was, what chance did I have? Sometimes, I would go to her and pat her shoulder and kiss her wet, salty cheek, but I always felt so helpless that the pit of my stomach would burn. Precocious at games and arithmetic, I had learned a couple of months earlier how to play two-handed 'honeymoon' pinochle, her favorite game and one that reminded her of her father. Sometimes playing pinochle took her mind off our problems. But the cards were deep in one of our boxes somewhere, and anyway, I didn't feel like sitting with her, helpless and hopeless. Everything would be fine when my father got back. Even if he hadn't managed to find a green cake... but I was sure he would... he'd care for Mother when she was sick and kiss her tears away when she was blue and play pinochle with her and take responsibility for keeping the family well and happy, and I'd just play my story games, and everything would be fine. I put my cheek against the cool window pane so I could look as far up the empty street as possible. People passed by occasionally: lone men walking slowly, their fists deep in their pockets, wishing this night were over; women hastening to get somewhere on time; young couples with their arms around each other's waist, keeping hip contact by stepping out with their inside legs at the same time, wishing this night would go on forever. When a car passed, the edge of its headlights rippled over the brick facades on both sides of the street and lit up my ceiling briefly. I considered slipping into my shoes and going out onto the stoop to await my father's arrival, but the night was cold, so I sat on the edge of my bed with my Hudson Bay blanket around me Indian-style and watched the street, as I would do night after night.

My father never came. But, of course, you have anticipated that for some time.

Settling In

Back in Lake George Village, I had been used to waking up to the sounds of birds chirping and little creatures rustling in the woods behind the summer cottage we rented, but that first morning on North Pearl Street I was wrenched out of sleep by the sound of my mother thrashing around angrily back in the kitchen. I went in to find her wobbling precariously atop the narrow kitchen table as she snatched down the green crepe paper festoons. One loop was just out of reach and she almost fell stretching out for it. I suggested we move the table, and she told me the last thing she needed was a six-year-old telling her what to do, goddamnit! Then she came down and hugged my head to her stomach and said she didn't mean to snap at her first-born and good right hand, but she was determined to get rid of all this green party crap that reminded her of that no-good, lying, irresponsible bastard!

Always spiky and short-tempered the morning after a night of grief or regret, she would rage against 'the big-shots' and 'the rotten way things are'. Although she always assured my sister and me that it wasn't us she was mad at, just the goddamned world out there, we were the ones who winced as she unleashed the famous French-'n'-Indian temper that served as both a purgative for depression and a source of flash energy in her struggle to keep our family together against the odds. This explosive safety valve of hers frightened Anne-Marie and angered me. Sometimes her shouting, door-slamming, pan-throwing rages against life's injustices would make me yell at her in defensive counter-rage, and we'd have a brief, hot word-fight that would make my sister recoil into herself. Then suddenly the storm would pass and we'd both be sorry. Mother would hug me and suggest that the three of us go out and play tag or Simon Says or some other kids' game. She was wonderful about playing games with us. Even after we came to Pearl Street and were under the eyes of the block's gossips, she would sometimes come out and play with us, shrugging off the harsh glances and captious muttering of neighbor ladies who thought she was just showing off her youth and energy and suppleness. As, indeed, she was, to a degree.

Silent now, but simmering within, Mother gathered up the green paper plates and napkins and crammed them into a bucket that would serve as our garbage can until she could afford to buy one (we used that bucket for eight years), then she grasped the warm bottle of lime soda by its neck, stepped out into the sooty backyard and, throwing side-armed like a boy, hurled it over the weathered board fence into the back alley, where the bottle burst with an effervescent explosion that I'd have given anything to have seen.

But what a waste! I'd never tasted green soda because my mother was against our drinking 'fizzy crap', in part because it wasn't good for us, and in part because it was expensive.

Anne-Marie came padding sleepy-eyed into the kitchen and she knew immediately what had happened. She was painfully sensitive to Mother's rages and could always smell the sulfur in the air. She looked at the paper plates in the bucket, then at me. I shrugged. She smiled faintly and waited until Mother was not in the kitchen before she dared to retrieve a couple of the crumpled plates to play 'Saint Patrick's Day party' with.

After a breakfast of peanut butter sandwiches Mother held the first of many 'war councils' around that kitchen table. Here's how things were: We were marooned on this slum street in this strange city where we didn't know anybody and nobody gave a damn about us, and we had only a little more than five bucks to our name. But we weren't beaten. Not by a damnsight. Nobody beats Ruby Lucile LaPointe! No, sir! In all the years she'd taken care of us kids alone, her pride had never let her seek public assistance, and it burned her up to have to do so now, but she'd been thinking about things all night long, and she couldn't let pride stand in the way of us kids having food on the table. There must be agencies and people that she could turn to, just until we were on our feet again. First she'd contact them and ask them for help... make them help us, goddammit! Then she'd look for work as a waitress. A hardworking, experienced waitress can always find work, even if it's only split-shift, or standing in for girls who call in sick. She'd go around to every goddamned restaurant in the city putting her name in with the managers. But first, she had to find out the addresses of the welfare agencies. If only she knew someone she could ask about things like this.

“What about Mr Kane?” I suggested.

“The grocery man? Oh, I don't know. I don't think we want any more favors from his sort.”

“...His sort?”

She shrugged.

“But he's nice,” I said. “And smart, too.”

She thought about that for a moment. She didn't like being beholden to strangers, but... Oh, all right, she'd go over to thank him for giving us credit. That was just common courtesy. And maybe while she was there she'd... “You know, come to think of it, this Mr Kane of yours just might help us out because if he doesn't, we won't be able to pay what we owe him. You can only count on people if there's something in it for them.”

“He'd help us anyway. He's nice.”

She humph'd. She often said, and honestly believed, that she was not prejudiced—well, except in the case of Italian mobsters and drunken Irish loafers and stupid Poles and snooty Yankee Protestants, but then who wasn't? Among the cultural scars left by her early years in convent school was a stereotypical view of 'the people who slew Jesus'. “On the other hand,” she said, always wanting to be fair, “I served some very nice Jewish people in Lake George Restaurant last season. They always chose my station. Real good tippers. But then they had to be, didn't they? To make up for things.”

I accompanied her across the street, and Mr Kane spent half the morning looking up the appropriate welfare agencies and using the pay phone at the back of his shop to call people and make appointments for my mother, while I took occasional trips back to our apartment to make sure Anne-Marie was all right, but she could just look out the front window and see us in Kane's Cornerstore. Mr Kane gave Mother a dog-eared map of downtown Albany so she could find the addresses and he drew her up a list of things she should bring with her to the welfare offices: her marriage license, our birth certificates, her most recent address in Lake George, the telephone number of his store, where messages could be left for her... things like that. I looked up at my mother to give her an 'I told you he was nice' look, and I was surprised to see tears standing in her eyes. She said later that she didn't know what got into her. I think that Mr Kane's kindly manner sapped the constant background rage that gave her the grit to face difficult situations. Whatever the reason, the next thing I knew she was telling him about my father, and how he had run out on us twice before, and about our coming to Albany in the hope of starting life as a family, and about the Saint Patrick's Day party with the green cake... everything. Pushing the tears back into her eyes with the heel of her hand, she confessed that she didn't know what she would do if somebody didn't help her. One thing was sure: she wouldn't let her kids starve! No, sir! She'd steal—kill even!—before she'd let her kids starve. Distressed by her tears, Mr Kane rubbed his hands together, not daring to pat her shoulder compassionately lest she misunderstand the gesture (or, worse yet, lest his wife do so). He told her he didn't want to pry or anything, but maybe he should also contact the local ward heeler. See if the machinery could be oiled to make it turn a little faster. Otherwise, we might have to wait months for our case to make its way through the turgid system. She thanked him for his help, but now there was a chill in her tone. I could tell that she was ashamed of having broken down before this stranger. As we crossed the street back to 238 she told me that I must always be careful with these people.

“But Mr Kane was just trying to be...”

“They have a way of worming things out of you.”

“He wasn't worming any—”

“You just be careful what you tell them, and that's final. Period!”

Later that month, when we were able to begin paying something against our slate, my mother felt vindicated in her mistrust of 'these people'. She discovered that Mr Kane had charged her a nickel for each call he made on her behalf. I explained that this was only fair because he had put a nickel into the slot for each call, but she waved this aside, saying she was sure he made a little something on each call. Why else would he have a phone taking up space in his shop? No, they work every angle, these people, believe me you.

With that 'believe me you' I think I'd better pause to explain that my mother's defiant independence extended to refusing to speak like everybody else. She had a tendency to get common idioms and clichés just that annoying little bit wrong. You may have noticed, and winced at, some of the askew figures of speech in the dialogue I've recorded for her, and perhaps you put them down to shoddy copy editing or to the writer's having momentarily nodded. In fact, I was trying to suggest my mother's slippery grasp of popular vernacular. She complained, for instance, of always having to 'shrimp and save', and she would declare that it would be 'a hot day in hell' before she'd do this or that, rather than a cold one which, presumably, is somewhat rarer. Uninteresting things were 'as dull as dish water' for her, and a pious, hypocritical woman 'looked as though her butter wouldn't melt'. I learned many of these twisted idioms from her only to experience the smarting humiliation of being corrected by people who were attuned to more conventional usage. The effect of this was to make me abjure hackneyed expressions from an early age, so I suppose I benefited from my mother's phrasal insouciance in the long run, although it's possible that my automatic eschewal of clichés occasionally drove me from the Scylla of ridicule into the turbid Charybdisian eddies of sesquipedalian obfuscation... though I trust not.

Mother's battles against the machinery of official compassion could not begin until the following morning, so we spent the rest of that day unpacking and putting things in order, making a home for ourselves, and Anne-Marie's spirits rose with the fun of playing house. Twice I was sent over to Mr Kane's, first to get a bar of Fels Naphtha soap and another of Bon Ami window cleanser (with the chick that 'hasn't scratched yet'), floor wax, cockroach powder, and... mortifying cargo for any little boy to have to carry past other children... a large package of toilet paper; and a second time to get groceries and milk for our lunch and supper. Both times Mr Kane did his vaudeville turn of getting things off the high shelves with his long, steel-fingered can-grabber and dropping them into his green apron, all the while joking and prattling so that I hadn't time to be embarrassed about asking him for more credit. While he was bagging up my purchases his wife, an unsmiling woman with features that seemed too big for her crowded face, came out from the back room and watched him to make sure he didn't drop a free piece of candy into my bag, as he had the first time. She made a tight-lipped comment about her husband having wasted enough time helping 'that new woman'.