The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (27 page)

Miserable, and angry for being made to feel miserable, I pretended to see an enemy soldier down the alley. I shot at him with my finger then ran off in pursuit until I was out of Mrs McGivney's sight.

For a long while, I kept out of the back alley that had been the principal arena for my story games. A couple of times over the following year I caught a glimpse of Mrs McGivney scuttling across to Mr Kane's late in the evening, but I always avoided her. I never saw her hero husband again.

I am now considerably older than Mrs McGivney was when I first responded to the rap of her nickel against the window. For many years I have lived as far away in space, time and culture from Pearl Street as one can get this side of death. And yet, on those nights when the black butterflies of remorse flutter through a sleepless nuit blanche, I still sometimes hear that broken-off summons, those two clicks followed by a recriminating silence; and my throat tightens with shame as I remember the lonely old woman who I didn't have time for because I was too busy trying to save myself.

Night Thoughts

Infinity gave me a lot of trouble. So did Time. And God.

I could define these words, but I didn't really possess them, not in the way I possessed 'house' or 'hate' or 'red'. “Infinity has neither beginning nor end.” I understood that in the sense that I knew what each of the words meant, but it was one of those slippery concepts that I could grasp, but not hold, and the harder I grasped, the quicker they would fly away... like trying to pick up a greased marble with chopsticks.

Late at night I would struggle with these awkward abstractions until I ended in a kind of intellectual vertigo that made me hug my pillow for comfort.

Take Time, for instance. I envisioned 'Now' as a bright instant of time racing forward from the Future into the Past, but the Past never grew longer by accumulating the constant flow of moments Now deposited into it, nor did the Future get any shorter for all the bits of Now that Time tore from it, because both Past and Future were infinite, and one cannot imagine infinity plus a bit, or minus a bit. Even that fleeting spark of Now is elusive, because as you pronounced the N, the W is still in the Future, and when you get to the W, the N is already in the Past, never to be seen again.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note22#note22” ??[22]?

In the end, I found respite from doubt and confusion by adding Infinity and Time and God to an ever-growing list of notions that were beyond my comprehension. I comforted myself with the assumption that I might come to understand them some day or, if not, that I would learn to accept that there were three categories of things out there: those I understood, those I would someday understand, and those I would never fully understand.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note23#note23” ??[23]?

I was born in 1930 when Hoover was president and Prohibition was still in force, so all the years of my life had been nineteen-thirty-something. But one afternoon as I was walking home from school I saw the date 1940 on a billboard advertising forthcoming models of Ford cars. I stopped and frowned at the number with a sense of foreboding. That 40 seemed ominous, a number that not only looked strange, but felt awkward in your mouth when you said it. Fooorrrtee. No, no, that was all wrong. Years ought to be 1935 or 1939 because that 3 was a nice round, safe, smooth, stable number. Who knew what harm this brash, unreliable 4 would bring, with its sharply protruding elbow and its precarious one-legged stance?

My misgivings about this new decade were confirmed when, by the end of 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union had divided Poland between them, and the Russians had gobbled up Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Then Stalin attacked Finland, whose small but fierce army fought the vast Russian war machine to a standstill through the winter. The courage and daring of the Finns was in stark contrast to the inactivity on Germany's western front, where England dithered and France cowered behind the Maginot Line, frozen with incertitude, wincing at phantoms. Mr Kane said that Hitler could have been stopped back in March of 1938, when he marched into Austria. At that time, his army had consisted of fifty-four divisions as against the thirty-plus divisions of Czechoslovakia, France's fifty-five divisions, and Poland's thirty. Even discounting chronically unprepared Britain, Hitler would have been outnumbered by more than two to one, and both the tactics and the machinery of his later vaunted Blitzkrieg were so untested, so unreliable that when he marched into Austria to receive the acclamation of the people, more than seventy percent of his mechanized infantry broke down and were obliged to continue to Vienna on foot. But by the winter of 1940, the Czechs and Poles were out of the game, and Germany was ready for war, both in materiel and morale, while the English lacked the first, and the French the latter.

Despite Mr Kane's gloomy predictions, there was reason to hope that we might not be swept up into a terrible European war after all. During Roosevelt's campaign against Wendell Willkie, when the only real issue was that FDR was running for a third term against all precedent and tradition, he had assured us, “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” I can still hear the drawled, syllable-and-a-half Groton pronunciation of 'your' and 'war', an accent America had come to trust as the sound of truth.

But Mr Kane believed it was our duty to get involved in the European war as soon as possible because of the things the Nazis were doing, not only to Jews, but to Gypsies, Communists, the mentally deficient, and homosexuals. He knew about the Warsaw ghettoes because, hunched over his receiver late one night, he had intercepted a desperate Morse code message from a courageous short-wave enthusiast in Warsaw, a man who used what may have been his last moments to broadcast.

During the Christmas vacation that began in the last of the comfortable 1930s and ended in the first of the ominous-sounding 1940s, my mother ragged and pestered the principal of Our Lady of Angels school into letting me transfer in mid-year, then she took me out of P.S. 5 where I was making low grades and always getting into trouble. Mother, who had a gift for explaining away every fault or flaw in her children, put it another way: she said she wanted to send me to a Catholic school where my energies, abilities and talents had a better chance of being recognized. It is true that more was expected of us at Our Lady of Angels, and its greater discipline produced an atmosphere more conducive to learning. Those stunningly plain, no-nonsense nuns nurtured their brighter students while they dealt efficiently with the mediocre and gently with the backward, but they did not tolerate those who disrupted the calm of the classroom, neither the recalcitrant dummies nor the precocious show-offs. Those tough old birds would swoop down on the wings of their starched wimples and snatch a trouble-maker around with dexterity and style that was a wonder to watch, and if the boy fought back or continued his disruptive ways, they would simply kick him out of school and let the public system deal with him.

Our Lady of Angels was seventeen blocks up the Lexington Avenue hill, steep blocks on sleepy mornings, and long cold windy blocks in winter, when I walked against the prevailing westerly winds that seemed to gain momentum as they swept downhill towards the river. Parochial school started half an hour earlier than public school and continued for half an hour longer in the afternoon (although we got Holy Days of Obligation off), and we had at least twice as much homework, but that didn't trouble me much. I could dash off the repetitive arithmetic problems or list the principal export products of the Belgian Congo or diagram compound sentences between my radio-listening hour and supper, and I would do the reading assignments at night, after Mother and Anne-Marie were asleep and before I began the nightly reading, mostly history and novels, that had become habitual to me, and remains so to this day. I enjoyed displaying my quickness at the blackboard in Math class, and I soon discovered that my knowledge of history was broader than that of the diligent, slightly baffled nun who taught the subject and who reacted to my occasional corrections or amplifications by lowering my grade on the basis of 'attitude in class'.

There were two categories of tedium-stunned students in every classroom: the slow kids who had so completely lost their grip on things that the teacher's instructions were meaningless clumps of sound, and the quick kids who got the idea somewhere in the middle of the teacher's first sentence, and whose minds were beaten into a pulpy stupor by the endless repetitions and illustrations necessary to bring the first glimmers of comprehension to the rest of the class. Early on, I learned to sit with my eyes on the teacher, my face set in an expression of rapt attention, while my mind was light-years away, totally engrossed in some internal game. I felt safe from being called on because kids who didn't know the answers seldom looked the teacher in the eye, fearing that to do so was to invite undesirable attention. Instead, they would frown into their textbooks and pretend to be thinking so hard that it would be a pity to disturb them with questions. But teachers were on to this ploy (probably having used it themselves when they were kids) so the safest way to avoid being called on was to appear to know the answer and to be eager to produce it aloud. But occasionally I got caught out.

One afternoon I was sitting at the back of a social studies class taught by a nun who had kept me late one day to tell me that she enjoyed the essays I wrote for her, and to say that she was sorry I was sometimes bored in her class, but she had to make sure the average student understood the work. My eyes were locked on this teacher's with the eager expression of a boy who knows the answer and is inwardly squirming for a chance to demonstrate his cleverness, while, in fact, my mind was off in some distant galaxy... and I'll be damned if she didn't call on me!

I stood beside my desk as we were required to do when our names were called, and after a moment of trying to remember what she had been rattling on about, and not coming up with anything, I said in an earnest voice tinged with wonder, “I don't know the answer, sister. I thought I did, but I don't. I honestly don't. It was right on the tip of my tongue, but...” and kids around me grinned with pleasure at watching me string the nun along. I continued with my protestations of baffled regret until the sister interrupted me with, “All right, Luke. You can sit down.” But I wouldn't be thwarted in my need to explain the astonishing phenomenon of being unable to produce an answer that I knew perfectly well, but for some reason just couldn't bring up from the depths of my—“All right, Luke. That will do!” My eyes filled with injury I slowly sat down, muttering plaintively, “I can't understand it. I knew it just a minute ago, but somehow it's—”

“Be quiet, Luke!”

“Yes, sister. It's just that I can't—”

“I don't want to hear another word from you!”

“Whatever you say, sister.”

“Shut up!”

“Yes, sister.” (This last muttered softly, so as to sneak in the 'last touch'.)

By this time, the class was sputtering with pent-up laughter, and for the rest of the hour the teacher's wounded eyes accused me of being a traitor in her eternal battle against mediocrity, but such occasional demonstrations of caste solidarity kept me from being thought of as a lick-spittle apple-polisher. Instead, the kids just thought I was a nut.

But playing to the gallery didn't keep me in the good graces of the bullies. I still had to go to Fistcity from time to time.

Unlike P.S. 5, I wasn't the only smart kid at Our Lady of Angels. There was a handful of bright, hard-working Jewish kids whose families paid to get them better educations than were available in the public schools. I envied those Jewish kids because when we had to take catechism they could sit in the library and do their homework, or just read books. And not only did they get out of school on Holy Days of Obligation without the morning-ruining burden of having to go to mass, but they didn't have to come to school on their own holidays, and during Lent they weren't obliged to make the stations of the cross twice each school day. It wasn't fair! Of course, these privileges had to be considered in light of the fact that they were sure to go to hell in the end. But even granting this harsh final reckoning, I wasn't at all sure they had the worst of the bargain, particularly as we Catholic kids were repeatedly assured that no matter how many rosaries we said, how fervently we made the stations of the cross or how many delicious things we gave up for Lent, there was always the risk of sudden death. Street wisdom held that being run over by a truck was as common an end for sinful kids as it was for those who didn't change their underwear regularly, and if death befell us before we had expunged our mortal sins, we'd go rocketing down to hell along with the Jewish kids, clear shorts or not. This, at least, was my understanding of the matter, one that was shared by the majority of kids who went to Our Lady of Angels school. I brought this matter up during a catechism class given by my old antagonist, the intense young priest with pink-rimmed eyes, terminal acne, and little patience with those who asked awkward questions. I asked how it could be that failure to obey any of the ten commandments would put your soul in danger of an eternity in hell. Surely some of these rules were more important than others, and some mortal sins were more... ah... mortal than others. It just couldn't be as bad to steal something or to bear false witness as it was to kill someone. Would you really be shot straight down to hell for having coveted something that belonged to your neighbor? Come on! And how did adultery, which was defined as sexual concourse of a married person with someone who was not his or her spouse, somehow get expanded to include just about every fleshly act, word or thought? Instead of answering this last question, the priest condemned the smutty and titillating practice of looking up dirty words in dictionaries and encyclopedias. (So even the word adultery was a dirty thing? And this priest found looking up such things 'titillating', did he?) On the wall over the priest's head was a hand-tinted photograph of the new pope, Pius XII. I could see that the pope was trying to smile benevolently, but his ascetic features and thin lips were not designed for smiling, and the eyes behind those round metal-framed glasses had an icy piscine glaze. That frozen smile and those pink rouged cheeks were somehow more forbidding than a righteous scowl would have been.