The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (9 page)

One afternoon in late fall Miss Cox said she wanted to speak to me after school. Apprehensive, I lingered as long as I could in the cloakroom. The only reprehensible things I'd done that day had been the vivid daydreams I slipped into while waiting for the rest of the class to finish a word problem. I let my fertile, furtive imagination settle on the girl who sat in front of me... what would the nape of her neck feel like if I stroked it?... and the golden hairs on her arms—I glanced up and saw Miss Cox looking down on me, smiling. Oh-oh! I had often had the uneasy suspicion that Miss Cox could read minds!

Perched on the edge of her desk, she whipped the corner of her shawl over her shoulder and looked down at me, hot and cramped in my jacket and feeling vulnerable without the insulation of my fellow students around me. “Have you ever been tested, Luke?” Right from the first day, she had had the sensitivity to use the American version of my name that I preferred. I was 'different' enough as it was without having a different kind of name.

“Ma'am?”

“Have you ever taken an IQ test?”? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note6#note6” ??[6]?

I said no, I didn't think so.

“H'm. But surely you know that you're quicker than other children... and that you learn more easily, yes?”

I didn't answer. It sounded like one of those trick questions adults are always decoying their quarry with.

“I think you ought to be tested, Luke, and I intend to arrange for it. Unfortunately, our Board of Education is behind the times and still uses the adult tests for children, and that can produce wild measurements, especially at the higher ranges of ability. I'm sure you'll turn out to have a high IQ, perhaps very high. And that's a good thing. But it's not everything. Do you know what IQ means?”

I admitted that I didn't.

“A person's Intelligence Quotient is an expression of the difference between his mental age and his physical age. If a child of, say, ten years old, did as well on an IQ test as most other ten-year-olds, he'd have an IQ of 100, which is what they call average intelligence. If he did as well as a child of thirteen, he'd have a 133 IQ. Above average.”

I nodded tentatively, still not sure where all this was leading.

She went on to tell me that no one had ever defined 'intelligence' in any useful way. Indeed, the man who invented intelligence testing, a Frenchman named Binet, ended up by admitting that: “The most accurate definition of 'intelligence' is: the quality my test measures.” And what Binet measured was a cluster of aptitudes and skills that made certain kinds of learning relatively easy, particularly the kinds one needs in a technological culture. “It's what I call round-peg/round-hole intelligence,” Miss Cox said dismissively, adding that she personally found such human qualities as kindness, fairness, gumption, honesty and compassion more valuable than the ability to figure out quickly which direction the sixth cogwheel of a system was turning.

“Do you understand what I'm saying to you, Luke?”

“That it's good to be intelligent, but it isn't the most important thing in the world and I mustn't get a big head.”

“Exactly. I'll let you know when it's time to take the test.” She turned her attention to some desk work she was doing.

I rose and began buttoning up my jacket. “Miss Cox?”

“H'm?” she hummed without looking up.

“I sometimes have the feeling that you can look right into my mind. I know you can't, of course, but...”

She continued scanning her page.

“I mean, you can't really see what I'm thinking, can you?”

She looked at me owlishly. “Can't I?”

I left.

When I got home that afternoon I was careful to mention the forthcoming IQ test in an offhand way, adding untruthfully that all new kids had to take them to keep my mother from making something big out of this. She was quick to build castles of expectation on the shifting sands of hope and longing.

Shortly thereafter, Miss Cox excused me from class to go to the principal's office, where I found a large woman with thick glasses, a red face, and a molten head cold that made her sniff constantly. She was a psychologist from the State Department of Education, and she gave me a long test to do against the wall clock that chopped off a minute with each click. It was a game, and I enjoyed it. I knew most of the answers even before looking at the multiple choices, and so I finished each section in less than half the time allotted, which the sniffing psychologist seemed to take as a professional affront... as though I were making light of her test and, by extension, of her expertise.

By the next morning it had got around the school that I had been sent down to the principal's office to meet a psychologist, and kids began to tease me about being a nutter. This gave birth to a new, happily transient, playground chant that followed me around during recess for a few days. Little girls would make the shame sign at me, scraping one forefinger on another as they chanted:

Mickey Rooney is a loony.

Like his ma, he's really goony.

I rankled at being called Mickey Rooney, a reference to my overacting the role of Gunga Din. This stung because Mickey Rooney was my least favorite actor after Rin-Tin-Tin (whom, come to think of it, Mickey Rooney resembled in his moist-eyed, canine need to be loved). I didn't even mind their calling me a loony, but I was sorry to have my suspicion confirmed that the block included my mother among its crazyladies. Fortunately, street gossip never grouped my mother with the block's full-blown nutters like Mrs Meehan across the street, or the old woman from around the corner who used to get away from her grandchildren a couple of times a year and run down the street screaming that she was the queen of heaven and the common-law wife of Jesus Christ. My mother's craziness was understood to be only a mild case that manifested itself in her 'funny' clothes, her 'tomboy' behavior and her repeated attempts to get part-time work, despite the danger that if she were caught working we would lose our welfare allowance.

Just before the Christmas vacation, I was given a note to carry home to my mother, asking her to come to school, where the principal and Miss Cox revealed my IQ score, which they told her in confidence because the then-prevalent theory was that a child shouldn't know his IQ because if it were low he would be discouraged and give up trying, and if it were high he might stop working and rest on his laurels. Naturally, my mother ignored this injunction and told me everything she had learned. On the adult test they had given me, I had scored a little better than the average fifteen-year-old, which, considering that I was only seven, gave me an IQ of something over 200, which Miss Cox had said was patently ridiculous and served only to point out the foolishness in using adult IQ tests for evaluating children as young as I. But my mother was delighted. More than 200! Well now!

I wasn't nearly as impressed. In fact, I was a little annoyed to learn that I was only as smart as an average fifteen-year-old. Vic Ravelli, a swaggering dolt from down the block, was fifteen years old, and to be told that I was only as smart as Vic Ravelli... Jeez! Hoping to deflate her optimistic dreams lest she get carried away, I said that I was probably already as smart as I was ever going to get, and that if I took the same test in, say, five years and did exactly as well, my score would fall from over 200 to 125. But that wouldn't mean I was getting any dumber. It was just a number thing. And if I went on in the same way, by the time I was fifteen I'd have an IQ of 100, and by the time I was thirty my IQ would be 50.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note7#note7” ??[7]?

But Mother dismissed my self-abnegating manipulation of the IQ scores. The principal had told her that my performance put me in the top fifth of the top one percent of the population. “The top fifth of the top one percent of the population,” my mother repeated, as though to cement it in her memory, “...the top fifth of the top one percent!” She was in awe of this brainy phenomenon she had produced (after such a long and difficult labor) and not a little proud of the woman who had produced it.

I had been afraid from the first that my mother would convert any good IQ score into yet greater confidence in, and reliance on, my ability to cause her ship to come in and transport us from North Pearl Street to Easy Street, so I explained to her that being in the top fifth of the top one percent of the population meant that one kid in every five hundred was like me, and this meant that Albany, with its one hundred thirty thousand residents, had two hundred and sixty people every bit as smart as I was; and among New York City's seven million, there were fourteen thousand of us! But this failed to puncture my mother's balloon of hope; indeed, it reinforced her faith in my genius. “How many boys could have worked all that out so fast in their heads? You've got a gift for figuring out the percentages, Jean-Luc, and if there's one thing I know, it's that being a success in business is mostly a matter of figuring out the percentages.”

So now I was going to be a businessman? Just when the example of Miss Cox had persuaded me to devote my life to teaching?

Even after the tests, I didn't think of myself as particularly gifted. I was smart, sure. Smarter than anyone I knew. But then, I lived on North Pearl Street and went to P.S. 5. What kind of standard was that to measure myself against? My idea of a gifted person was one who could think up new inventions, new methods, new systems, and that wasn't me. I wasn't so much intelligent as quick-minded. More than half the class would get the right answer to the mathematical word problems. My answers weren't any more correct than theirs, it was just that I got them while Miss Cox was still dictating the problems. If I had a gift I was proud of, it wasn't 'intelligence', it was my ability to create situations and characters for the story games I constructed from fragments of reading and, later, from adventure programs I heard on that most absorbing and evocative of all media, radio.

One morning during that winter vacation the mailman brought a letter addressed to me. The first letter I ever received. It was a Christmas card from Miss Cox, a snowy old-fashioned street scene with smiling people and kids skating on skates with blades that curled up in front, the kind of card that is appropriate for people of all religions, or none. Inside she wrote: “To Jean-Luc. Your quick understanding and intelligent questions make teaching a pleasure. And a challenge, too!” My mother read the note and beamed. “I'll bet you're her pet. Why else would she send you a Christmas card?” I shrugged, embarrassed but pleased. I was later to learn that she sent cards to all of her students, each with an appropriate supportive message.

Mother had found split-shift work in two restaurants during that Christmas season, so she was able to afford special gifts for us: an expensive doll for Anne-Marie that could wet its diapers as it emptied its bottle (girls' toys are so dumb!), and for me a three-volume compendium called High School Subjects Self-Taught that offered condensed courses on everything from Astronomy and Biology to World History and Zoology. At first, I felt ambivalent about this present that was so obviously intended to move me along more quickly to the time when I could get out into the commercial world and drag that damned ship into port. But I became intrigued by the self-graded tests at the back of the book that you could rip out along dotted lines and mail to the publishers together with five dollars in cash or stamps, and they'd send you an embossed imitation parchment high school diploma issued by the fully accredited American National High School Association, which had the same address as the publisher. Any fear that dishonest people might cheapen the value of this diploma by looking up the test answers in the book was dispelled by a notice declaring that 'these tests must be taken in accordance with the strictest Honor System, which obliges all candidates for a diploma to act fairly and honorably.' Well, you can't ask for more protection than that. I worked it out that if I applied my newly discovered IQ to this book with diligence, I could get a high school diploma by the time I was ten, finish college at fourteen and, if I fulfilled my mother's wish that I become a doctor, I should be ready to perform my first brain surgery at the age of nineteen.

I could have used my potential medical skills a little earlier because the stress and fatigue of working late shifts in those restaurants night after night, then walking home through the snow and slush to save the trolley car money had the usual effect of giving my mother a terrible cold, and she passed Christmas Day in bed with chills and fever, and me doctoring her with aspirin and mustard plasters so hot that they burned my fingers, so I'd plop them quickly onto her bare back. She had a particularly hard night, hacking and coughing, gasping for breath as she hung over the edge of her bed to help the phlegm 'come up', a process that tested the limits of my squeamishness. I sat on the edge of her bed, trying to relieve her wracking cough by rubbing her back with Balm Bengué. (As a little kid I had marveled at how Dr. Bengué managed to sign each and every tube, and later I was embarrassed at having been so gullible.)

Late one night, after Anne-Marie had gone to bed with her incontinent doll and my mother had finally fallen into a shallow, rasping sleep, I opened High School Subjects Self-Taught and began to learn those random, unconnected facts that have clung to my memory ever since: the Great Wall of China was begun by Shih Huang-ti, Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome on Christmas Day of 800 AD, sulfuric acid is H2SO4, the three kinds of solid-state carbon fuel are peat, lignite and anthracite. Although age and illness now cause me to forget things that happened yesterday, hundreds of facts gleaned from that book more than sixty years ago are still with me. I even remember where they were on the page.