The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (38 page)

...Well, I didn't actually run away... When things got too bad I used to escape into a story game about running away from home. This involved days of preparation. I planned to leave on a Sunday, right after mass, and I made up plausible stories about chores I had promised to do up at the priest house, jobs that would involve working all day and well into the evening. This would keep my mother from contacting the police until after nightfall, by which time I would be miles away from Albany. I intended to walk and hitchhike west, living by my wits. I would travel from one little lake to the next because I knew from living in Lake George that rich people had lake cottages that stood empty most of the time. I'd be able to sneak in and out of them and no one would ever know. There would be a few cans of food in the larders that the owners wouldn't miss, and of course, being by a lake, I could always supplement my diet with fresh fish... once I learned how to fish, that is.

At the library I pored over the road maps and worked out my route west along the Mohawk Valley. I chose secondary roads to avoid getting picked up by the state police, and I listed the small towns where I could stay overnight after getting my supper in a warm, cheerful little house in return for whitewashing a back fence for a kind-hearted woman with a name like Aunt Polly. Once I got to Lake Erie everything would be fine. I'd stow away on a lake freighter and the next thing you know I'd be in Canada or Minnesota, where I'd find someone who needed a smart kid to help him with his business, and I'd make money to send home, and sooner or later I'd make a big killing and become rich enough to get my family off Pearl Street.

Part of my preparation involved stashing away, bit by bit, the emergency food I might need on the road: pieces of dark toast for my 'hardtack' and a glutinous mixture made of oatmeal, mashed up dried apple and whatever else I could find, dampened with water and pressed into a washed-out tin can. This was the 'pemmican' of my 'iron rations'. (I had gone through a period of masochistic fascination with the privations of polar exploration.)

But the days of careful planning needed to effect my break-out always sufficed for me to get over feeling wounded by whatever sharp word or criticism had made me want to run away in the first place, so in the end I would decide I really couldn't leave my mother and sister, and I would confirm this acceptance of my obligations by the ceremony bringing my iron rations into the back alley and eating them... stuffing them down, that is, because the toast was by then explosively dry and my versions of pemmican were always vile-tasting and slimy. Despite my native squeamishness I was usually able to dispose of the evidence of my perfidious plan to leave my family in the lurch by swallowing the filthy stuff, thus punishing myself for even considering running out on them. But sometimes it was just so foul that I had to leave it out in the back alley, where some other kid needing iron rations might be glad to find it.

It would be misleading to give the impression that I found the responsibility for getting my mother and sister out of North Pearl Street so burdensome that I sat up every night planning to run away and free myself. In fact, the hours I spent looking out onto the street were, for the most part, pleasant and restful. I would sit on the edge of my bed or kneel by the window, drifting through daydreams, making up narratives, or slowly turning some concept in the fingers of my mind until drowsiness overwhelmed me. Only occasionally, when the pressures became too great, would I slip into the balm and refuge of what I called The Other Place... a mystic internal locale to which I enjoyed privileged access.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note41#note41” ??[41]? But when money was particularly tight, or Mother was ill for a long time, or deep in the blues that crushed the joy out of her, tension would sneak up on me as I sat at the window, until I realized that my jaw muscles were sore from standing out like ropes as I ground my teeth with the dread that I would never be able to accomplish the task of bringing our damned ship in. I simply didn't know what to do! It was at these times that I found comfort in planning to run away from home. Not often. Maybe twice a year or so. But I never did carry out the escape game that served as an emotional release valve, and after Ben arrived I no longer felt the need to run away because I had found someone on whom I could off-load responsibility for my mother's happiness.

Over the months that followed I learned more about Ben, some of it troubling. I learned why he didn't drink... or, rather, that he did drink, but only rarely and with considerable risk. Mother talked him into taking his acid-green suit down to the barrel-shop and trading it in on a looser-fitting mud-colored three-piece suit. To initiate it they both dressed up and went out for a beer at the Corner Tavern down on Quackenbush Street, where I used to drop in with my shoe-shine box on Friday nights. They got back pretty early, and Ben didn't seem drunk or even especially exhilarated, but the next day he got into a bitter argument with the foreman in the brewery and the upshot was that he got fired. It wasn't long before he found another job, digging sewer lines in the nearby town of Watervliet, but it paid less and it was cold, wet work. Mother made sandwiches for his lunch pail and a thermos of hot soup, but he missed coming home to her every noon so they could have an hour together without us kids around. Ben confessed to Mother (and she thought it was necessary to take me aside and tell me 'on the QT') that drinking that beer at the Corner Tavern had been a big mistake. He swore to her that he drank very seldom, so he certainly wasn't an alcoholic or anything like that, but this wasn't the first time that he had taken a few drinks, and then had done something stupid that cost him his job, or his money, or a friend. He couldn't understand it. Above all, he couldn't understand why he took a drink in the first place, considering the disastrous effect it almost always had on him. It wasn't that he got drunk—not unsteady or morose or maudlin or aggressive; he didn't drink enough for that. The effect drinking had on Ben was to make him do something stupid or self-harming, a loss of judgment that usually didn't occur until the day after he had drunk a couple of beers. He had promised himself a hundred times that he would never touch a glass of beer again, but he always did. He claimed that he sort of forgot the consequences. Forgot! Now that's nuts. He wondered if maybe his father, whom he had never known, had been an alcoholic or a nutcase or something like that.

He told Mother that he had first noticed this weakness when, at the age of sixteen, he had lied about his age and enlisted in the Navy. After surviving those boot-camp routines and fatigues that are designed to crush the last traces of individualism, he took his first liberty from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station with some other boots. During his twelve hours of freedom in Milwaukee he drank a couple of shots of whisky... just showing off, playing it for grown up. The next day, although he had nothing against the Navy, he climbed over a fence and kept going until he was in Seattle. From that time on, Ben had drifted from one low-paid, casual job to another, never daring to seek regular employment because he feared that the Navy was looking for him and if they found him, they would put him into prison for desertion. This accounted for all the crappy jobs taken over the years by a man who possessed a powerful work ethic and the gifts of intelligence and initiative that should have brought him better-paid work. It also accounted for his drifting from place to place across the country, keeping on the move because he feared that 'they' were looking for him.

Even in that winter of 1940-41, when unemployment was beginning to loosen its stranglehold as industry expanded to serve America's Lend-Lease Program for equipping England to fight the Germans, Ben never sought the higher-paying work his native abilities merited, because such work would oblige him to reveal his Social Security number, through which the Navy could find him. He limited himself to doing mindless stoop-labor at places that paid him cash-in-hand at the end of each week and no questions asked.

I resented Mother's taking me into her confidence about Ben's peculiar problems with alcohol, because there was nothing I could do about it other than worry. But I still enjoyed his company, his rich cache of stories, and his wry, earthy view of human nature. Because he was quick-minded enough to have picked up the essentials of half a dozen building trades by working as a casual helper, he viewed all claims of privilege based upon 'experience' to be smoke screens thrown up by those who feared competition. He said that most men who brag of having ten years' experience on the job have really only had a week's experience repeated 520 times. He believed that any bright person can do anything these 'craftsmen' can do; the only 'experience' he needs is learning the language of the trade and having access to the specialized tools; all the rest is down to brains, motivation and the ability to generalize from particulars. When a lamp needed repair Ben would let me help him. He began by explaining the general principles of electrical flow, personifying an electron as 'this negatively charged yahoo who comes high-tailin' it down a wire so fast that his friction heats up the filaments and makes them glow.' Having sketched in the principles involved, he would do the specific job in hand, repairing a short in a wire, for instance, explaining everything as he did it, step by step, then he would undo his work and let me do it, patiently accepting the fact that my clumsiness and inexperience would cause any job to take three times as long with my help as it would have taken without it. Finally, he would generalize what we had done and show how the same theory and the same methods would apply to other problems with electrical things that didn't work.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note42#note42” ??[42]?

I liked the rubbery flexibility of Ben's battered face. His rough-house life had left him with a broken nose and puffy brows, but he had remained an optimist at core, and he knew hundreds of folksy similes, some of which were pretty blue and drew my mother's prudish disapproval, like 'being as frustrated as a one-armed paper-hanger', or working as hard 'as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest' or saying that something unpopular 'went over like a fart in a diving bell'. I also appreciated his well-developed sense of the absurd. He and I would sometimes join forces in chasing some idea to its reductio ad absurdum, usually to my mother's frowning annoyance because she found the absurd baffling and irritating (perhaps irritating because baffling). I recall one evening when Ben was telling stories about hobos he had met while riding the rails. He described one of them as being ugly... so-o ugly that all his ugliness wouldn't fit on his face, so he had to carry some of it around with him in a paper bag. I instantly jumped into the stream of his absurdity, suggesting that some day this hobo might meet a woman who was beautiful... so-o beautiful that all her beauty wouldn't fit on her face so she had to carry some of it around in a paper bag. And if, for some reason, this ugly hobo decided to pour the excess ugliness out of his bag into hers—

Ben immediately caught on and continued, “...there would be a loud snap, crackle and pop, and when they looked into her bag... it would be empty!”

“Exactly!” I said, slapping the table with delight.

Mother blinked. “I don't get it. Why was the bag empty?”

“Because,” I explained, “his ugliness had canceled out her beauty, leaving nothing behind!”

“Maybe there was a gray powder of ordinary looks left behind,” Ben suggested.

“No,” I said. “If his ugliness had blended with her beauty, they might have produced ordinary looks; but they didn't blend, they neutralized one another!”

“You're right, partner. There wouldn't have been anything left in the bag. In fact, the vacuum created by the sudden neutralization would have sucked that bag together so tight that it wouldn't have been a bag any longer, just a double-thickness piece of paper.”

Mother sniffed and said she just didn't see the point of all this nonsense, and Ben winked at me and told her with great seriousness that she was absolutely right, there was no sense to it. Then he admonished me for wasting time on ridiculous ideas that didn't have any sense to them, and I said I was sorry and I would never, ever do it again, and Ben said, “And make sure you don't!”

Although Ben didn't possess any of the social and physical graces that my mother had found so attractive in my father (on the few occasions that I saw Ben run, his arms and legs had the every-which-a-way chaos of a startled herd), and although his habits of speech were too scatological and salty for her, she appreciated his essential kindness and his native sense of fair play. But she was not proud to be seen in his company. In short, except for his bizarre and troubling reaction to alcohol, Ben possessed all those solid qualities that parents look for in a husband for their daughter, but few of those decorative ones the daughter seeks on her own behalf.

The five dollars a week that he paid Mother for his meals was enough for her to put a little into the Dream Bank, and that made her feel more secure than she had for years. By Easter, Ben had become a member of our family even to the extent of joining in the ritual of sitting in the dark to listen to the Friday night mystery programs on our Emerson. Anne-Marie was comfortable with him, and she was more sensitive than I about Mother's ambiguous feelings towards him. One Saturday when we were walking home from a movie we had been sent to so the adults could be alone together, she confided to me that she thought Ben liked Mother more than Mother liked Ben, and she hoped Mother didn't 'break Ben's heart'. I wrinkled my nose at the soap-opera phrasing, but I knew what she meant.