The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (17 page)

When my grandfather got home a little after eight, he found Maud sitting in the gloom, the room lit only by the greeting lamp in the window. Not one cup of tea had been poured, not a cookie eaten, not a word of gossip exchanged. The 'fallen woman' had been ostracized by buggy after buggy that passed by, its occupants looking stiffly ahead. Maud was in tears. Tears of rage as much as tears of humiliation.

At a quarter after six the following Monday morning, my grandfather entered Henry & Francis Driscoll's General Store ('Hank 'n' Frank's Place') where the village men gathered around the pot-bellied stove in a start-of-the-week ritual. With Ed LaPointe's entrance, the conversation stumbled and dried up as men glanced at one another uneasily, but he greeted the gathering breezily and asked 'Mule' Milner, the village strong man who did odd jobs, how he was feeling that morning. Assuming that Ed LaPointe had a chore for him down at the station, Mule rose from his chair close to the stove and said he was feeling fit as a fid—Ed hit him so hard that his nose splatted, and Mule sprawled back into the laps of three townsmen.

“Don't get up, Mule,” Ed warned. “I'll just have to put you down again.”

Mule blinked, stunned and baffled. But he had the good sense not to stand up.

“Sorry I had to hit you,” my grandfather said, passing him his handkerchief. “But you're the strongest man in town, and what I'm doing here is making a point. All right, you can get up now. Go over and have Doc Burns fix your nose, and put it on my bill. Come on, give me your hand. Up you come.” After Mule had staggered down the front steps of the general store, Ed turned to the assembly. “Last Saturday my wife spent all morning baking cookies. And how many people came calling? Not one. Not a single one of you. Can you imagine how that hurt her feelings? Well, that's not going to happen again. Here's how things are going to be, gentlemen...” He told them that next Saturday there would be a lamp lit in their window, and his wife would be serving tea and cookies, and he expected every man in that store—and their wives!—to drop in for a cup of tea, a cookie or two, and a little pleasant conversation. He admitted that he couldn't make them do anything they didn't want to do. They were free citizens of a free country, and it was entirely up to them if they came calling or not. But Ed would drop in to the general store the following Monday morning, and if anyone there had not shown up in Maud's parlor—with his wife!—another man would have to bring his nose over to Doc Burns to get it fixed.

“Now, we all know that if you decide to take me on three or four against one, you're pretty sure to win. But it's a funny thing about those damned Indians. They just don't know when to quit. Sooner or later I'll meet you when you're on your own and you will get busted. You can believe that like you believe the sun will rise tomorrow. Well, gentlemen...” He took out his pocket watch. “...I've got to meet the 6:25. See you next Monday.” And he left.

The following Saturday, Maud ran out of cookies and she had to refill the kettle several times. Most of her women visitors were tight-lipped and crisp-voiced, but the men praised her cookies volubly and begged her to give their wives her recipe.

In time, Maud earned the friendship and admiration of those younger village women who shared her sense of outrage that women were denied the right to vote and joined in her efforts to remedy that injustice. She and Ed had five live children before she died in 1918, a victim of the Spanish 'Flu that killed more people than the First World War. Ed LaPointe never remarried, and his grief never healed. He brought up his two sons and three daughters himself, and later he drained his modest savings to help them through the early years of the Great Depression, until he died in an automobile accident at the age of fifty-one. From time to time, chances for getting posted to better-paying stations came along, but he turned them down because he didn't want to leave Fort Anne, where his wife was buried and where, every Saturday evening from her death until his, he spent an hour sitting at her graveside, silently telling her how the kids were getting along, and what was happening in the village, and how much he missed her.

One bit of good news he was able to share with her was that women had finally won the vote.

This iconographic image of my grandfather sitting in the gathering evening beside the grave of his Maud took on a radiant significance within the families of his five children, symbolizing the tenderness of romantic marriage and the depth and durability of a great love. But as a man who has lived twenty years longer than my grandfather did, I discern something self-indulgent and damaging in his disproportionate grief at a time when his children needed all the attention and love he could give. A stronger, wiser or more sensitive man would have concealed most of his grief to prevent his children from feeling that he had loved Maud more than he could ever love any of them, which, in the self-immolating way of children, they would assume had something to do with their inadequacies, not their father's. The most affected by his selfish bereavement were my mother and his oldest daughter, Odette. He took Odette out of school at the age of fourteen to become the family's homemaker responsible not only for the cooking and cleaning, but for organizing her siblings' household chores. This removed her from the one-of-the-gang camaraderie of the children and put her into a no-woman's-land of responsibility without moral authority. Trapped by the praise of the entire town for her dutiful self-sacrifice, Odette continued to keep house for her father until she was nearly thirty, when she rebelled and left to enter the stream of life, thereafter maintaining only the flimsiest contact with the others, whom she identified with her lost youth. As though to rebuke my grandfather for taking her out of school where she had been a highly praised student, Odette worked hard to make up her lost education and eventually entered a normal college to train as a teacher. It was there that she met a man and married, starting her life as an adult woman at the age of thirty-three.

My mother's childhood was less obviously but more profoundly scarred by her mother's death. From the first, she had lacked the self-assurance that comes with having an established role within a family. As we know, the eldest child of each sex enjoys those character-building responsibilities and those first-through-the-gauntlet privileges that breed confidence and self-knowledge, just as the youngest benefits from greater freedom and the cosseting that engenders a sense of 'specialness'. But my mother was the third child in a family of five in which the eldest and youngest were boys, so she was the middle girl of a middle group of girls. Her elder sister was the responsible one; her younger sister was the cherished one; my mother was... the other one.

My grandfather's reaction to Maud's death did permanent damage to my mother's already fragile self-esteem. He asked his two unmarried sisters to take his 'middle girl' to live with them in Plattsburg, up on the Canadian border. He assured my mother that he would bring her back home as soon as he had 'worked things out'. She was the only child to leave the home; her older brother had quit school at sixteen and was contributing part of his earnings to the family; her younger brother was little more than a baby and had to be cared for by her older sister, the homemaker; and her younger sister's cute antics brought some sunlight into her father's life. My mother felt the pain of separation intensely, particularly as her maiden aunts had very little English, and she was expected to speak to them in French, of which she had only a smattering because her Yankee mother had insisted that theirs would be an English-speaking house because she knew that the only access to the unique American experience is through the English language. (A fact that fans of multi-cultural education still choose to ignore.)

My mother rebelled, refusing not only to speak French, but to understand the rules by which her aunts ordered their narrow, pious lives. She did, however, send monthly letters in French to her father, writing with a careful, blot-free hand. I have one of them on my desk at this moment, and the French is not only grammatically correct, but even elegant in the formulaic way of French epistles. I suspect that she copied letters written for her by her aunts. When she finally returned to her family a year later, everything in the running of the house and the daily routine had changed in her absence, duties and roles had been assigned, all the niches filled. An outsider in her own home, she sought recognition and significance by emulating her father, hoping to earn his approval. He pitched for the town baseball team and had its highest batting average throughout those years when Fort Anne was the terror of such centers of baseball excellence as Comstock, Truthville and Whitehall; so my mother became a tomboy and played short-stop for the youth club, the only girl on the team.

Over the years, Calvinist-Republican-Anglo-Saxon Fort Anne came to accept Catholic-Democrat-half-breed Edmond LaPointe, the man who knew more about them than their minister or their doctor because his position as station master meant that he knew of their every voyage, their every shipment of goods, their mail, their telegrams, and those great events of marriage, birth and death that gathered their extended families from up and down the railroad network, and he was never known to gossip or to break a confidence. In the view of the townsfolk, his life-long mourning for Maud mitigated, to a certain extent, his audacity in having married her in the first place. He was the outsider who overcame what they viewed as disadvantages of race, religion and culture, but who had, through hard work, earned the right to be considered a part of their village. It became idiomatic to speak of Ed LaPointe as a 'real success story'.

All her life, my mother yearned to be a success, too, and thereby earn her father's admiration and respect.

...Admiration and respect? Look at me! Ruby Lucile LaPointe, living on public charity! My mother would rage against the series of blows that had brought her low, until we knew the litany of misfortune by heart. First her husband deserted her, then the Depression swept over the country, drying up jobs, then her father died and she lost her last source of emotional and financial support, then her fragile lungs made it impossible for her to keep a steady job. The fact that she viewed even the Great Depression as a personal affront reveals the sense of grievance she nurtured all her life.

But she wasn't ready to give up. No, sir! She tightened her jaw against Fate and clung doggedly to her certitude that one of these days our ship would come in, and when it did, we'd be ready to board it, '...come hell and high water!'

Boo-Hoo... Two Sleepy People... Jeepers Creepers (where'd you get those peepers)... I Double Dare You... You Go to My Head... Thanks for the Memory...

Her substitution of 'hell and high water' for 'hell or high water', the 'or' evoking Revelation's alternative eschatological cataclysms of Fire or Flood, led me into an error that persisted for years. I always envisioned an interfering she-devil named Helen Highwater who vented her wrath on people who were just trying to get along.

Another of Mother's life-long misapprehensions was her belief that the 'hoi polloi' were ritzy, snobbish folk. When she said the words she would push the tip of her nose up with her finger to illustrate the snootiness of these hoi polloi. I suspect this error was based on the similarity between 'hoi polloi' and 'hoity-toity'. In fact, the two derogations often appeared side by side in a rosary of epithets accusing someone of a real or imagined snub, as in '...and if that snooty, hoity-toity, hoi polloi bastard thinks that he...!' As is often the case with self-taught children who develop their vocabularies in cultural isolation, I later experienced the stinging embarrassment of misusing 'hoi polloi' and 'Helen Highwater' in public. Similarly, my Terpsichore had only three syllables, and my Penelope's last five letters were pronounced 'elope', as in 'to run away to marry'. My mortification when corrected on these occasions was all the hotter (and all the more deserved) because I had been parading my learning. It would be some time before I learned that 'the hoi polloi' was a tautology, and longer yet before I understood that to drop the 'the' was worse than tautological, it was pedantic.

Mother got idioms and adages wrong through mishearing or carelessness, but she also shared with most Americans the conviction that a person doesn't really have to be all that precise in speech (indeed, that there is something nitpicking and snooty in being so). So long as you're truly sincere about what you are saying, you can just throw sounds in the general direction of your notions, and your interlocutor will get the idea. But for all her liberal attitudes towards usage, one of her solecisms derived from an effort to avoid slack diction. When describing people who thought too highly of themselves (those ritzy hoi polloi bastards who stiffed her when she was working as a waitress, for example) she would accuse them of being 'highfaluting', the terminal 'g' scrupulously pronounced, as though it derived from the verb 'to falute', meaning something akin to 'to flaunt', and those who faluted broadly could be said to high-falute.

By the end of our second summer on North Pearl, my interest in unusual words and my eagerness to inflict them on others had earned me a place as one of the block's 'characters', those kids who possessed some special trait or ability. Some kids stood out because they were tough, some were envied because they were sickly and got to stay away from school a lot, some could run fast, one was famous for being amazingly dirty, another could almost rupture your ears with his piercing screams, one was called 'wormy', not because he had worms, but because he could eat them, to every onlooker's fascinated disgust, and I was known as the 'professor'... the smart one. This might have been a dangerous role to play because teachers tended to favor smart kids, but luckily I was also a clown and a wiseass, and that made my smartness less objectionable to my classmates. My wiseassery never made them envious of me because the ability to make subtle fun of a teacher was not considered nearly so desirable a social attribute as the ability to burp or fart loudly during a quiz, or a prayer.