The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (39 page)

Summer vacation was half over when my mother received a letter from her cousin, Lorna, who lived in a small quarrying town on the Vermont border. Lorna and Mother had been very close when they were teenagers, closer than Mother had been to either of her sisters, with whom she had felt she had to compete for her father's love. The two cousins won all the cups on offer for dancing the Charleston together, but the 'Deadly Dancing Duo', as they styled themselves, broke up when Lorna met Tonio, a lazy, handsome bully who had a newspaper/magazine/candy shop that was also a numbers outlet. Right from the first, my mother and Tonio didn't hit it off, and when he made a play for her while dating her cousin, she told Lorna that she was too good for him, and she ought to drop him like a hot tomato. When Lorna got pregnant, Mother offered to help pay for an abortion, because anything would be better than living her life with a man like that. There was no abortion and Lorna and Tonio got married, but she miscarried a month after the wedding, and something must have gone wrong because she never got pregnant again. Tonio never quite lost the suspicion that he had been somehow tricked into this marriage.

Tonio saw to it that the two cousins didn't see much of each other over the years that followed, but when Mother married my father, the whole family got together for the wedding, where my grandfather didn't bother to hide his low estimation of the strutting Tonio, who wore black silk ties and fedoras with wide snap brims in imitation of George Raft, whom he resembled. When Tonio bragged about his contacts among the 'smart boys' from Glens Falls and Troy, there were words between him and my grandfather that ended with Tonio dragging Lorna away from the reception, and Mother always felt that her favorite cousin's failure to stay at the reception had jinxed her marriage.

After my father deserted us for the second time, we had been obliged to live with Lorna and Tonio for a couple of months while Mother looked for a job. But the presence of Anne-Marie and me in their childless home caused friction. 'Uncle' Tonio (Mother had us call them aunt and uncle out of affection for Lorna) took a particular dislike to me. He looked on my bookishness as a personal affront because he had flunked out of school. But he'd shown them all by buying his newspaper/magazine/candy shop with a loan from 'the boys down in Troy', the boys he ran numbers for. Uncle Tonio found my habit of muttering to myself in the course of my story games particularly irritating. “You wanna know what that kid is? I'll tell you what he is. He's crazy, that's what he is. A crazy kid with big words running out his mouth, that's all he is.” One day I responded sassily to something he said, and he cuffed me on the back of the head. Mother's F-'n'-I temper flashed, and there was a shouting match, with Mother calling Tonio a cheap numbers flunky and Tonio responding that it was no wonder her husband had dumped her, with her constant carping and bitching. My mother said at least my father hadn't knocked up some romantic kid to make her marry him, and the next thing you know, the two cousins were going a few rounds, picking at the scab of an old sore concerning the Charleston cups they had won when they were dancing together. They both wanted to know where those cups were now. You tell me! I don't have them! Well, I certainly don't have them! Well, somebody's got them! Well, not me! And it all ended up in shouts and tears and slamming doors.

An hour later, I found Anne-Marie sitting on the cellar stairs, rocking herself, her eyes fixed on the darkness below. Although she was not yet two, strife and tension upset her deeply, obliging her to withdraw into herself in search of a peaceful place to be. I sat beside her until she became aware of my presence and stopped rocking herself. For a time, she just sat there, breathing in and out evenly, then she rose and went out into the backyard. I knew from experience that she would have to be alone for a while before she was able to be with people again.

The following morning, Mother, Anne-Marie and I were on a bus for Lake George Village, where she managed to find a job before the money in her purse ran out.

About a year later, when my father wrote to her out of the blue asking us to join him in Albany so we could pick up the threads of our life together, Mother had to swallow her pride and contact Lorna to ask if Tonio could help us move our few possessions to Albany. Grudgingly, yet triumphantly, he drove over to Lake George Village in his old truck, loaded it up with our stuff, crammed the three of us into the front seat beside him, and brought us to North Pearl Street, all without saying more than half a dozen words, and most of these grumbled under his breath. Mother never forgave him for just dumping us on the sidewalk and driving away, and the two cousins had not communicated since. Mother had been hurt by her long separation from Lorna—not that she ever thought their falling out was her fault in any way! No, sir! And she'd be goddamned if she'd be the first to apologize, believe me you!

Aunt Lorna's unexpected letter invited me to come to Granville that summer and spend the month of July with them. Mother read this as a gesture of reconciliation, an oblique request for forgiveness on Lorna's part, if not on Tonio's, and she was willing to meet her part way. She asked me what I thought about the idea of spending July in Granville.

“Well... I don't know...”

“It might do you good to get out of the city for a while. I'll do the paper route for you.”

“Yes, but...”

“And you won't be bored. Lorna says that Tonio says there's plenty for a boy to do around there.”

“Yeah... well...”

And it was settled. I was going to have a nice vacation, like it or lunk it.

In April Hitler came to the assistance of the Italians who had been beaten to a standstill by Greek partisans. Germany invaded Greece and Yugoslavia, both of which were overrun by the end of the month. On the radio, solemn-voiced commentators explained that Hitler had dared to attack Yugoslavia because the Russo-German Nonaggression Pact assured him that the Soviets would not intervene on the side of their fellow Slavs. Now the Axis dominated all of Europe except for six countries: Switzerland and Sweden, which enjoyed a profitable neutrality, Spain and Portugal, which were ruled by fascist dictators whose neutrality was distinctly pro-German, and Ireland, whose neutrality was distinctly anti-English.

England stood alone.

That June, Hitler renounced his Nonaggression Pact with the Russians and launched a surprise invasion, his armored units penetrating deep into Soviet territory as all opposition seemed to melt before the invincible German tanks.

When I asked Mr Kane about this out on his side steps, I was surprised that he seemed less gloomy than he had been of late, despite the news broadcasts telling us day after day how much farther the Germans had thrust into Russia. “He's made a mistake,” Mr Kane said, looking down at the hard-packed sooty earth of his 'garden' with narrowed eyes, as though he were peering into the future. “Hitler has made Napoleon's mistake. He'll be conquered by the vast distances, and by the weather. The versts and snow. Russia's ancient weapons. Like Napoleon, Hitler will be beaten by General Winter.”

Nothing brought the reality of the distant European war to us so personally as the popular songs we followed on the weekly Your Lucky Strike Hit Parade. As early as 1939, many people had been touched by the resilience and courage evinced in 'We'll Meet Again', a song that we knew, not in its original stiff-upper-lip British version by Vera Lynn, but in the smooth, easy-listening version made popular by the Ink Spots.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note43#note43” ??[43]? As the war came closer, three popular songs in particular revealed the state of things in Europe: 'White Cliffs of Dover', 'My Sister and I', and 'The Last Time I Saw Paris'.

July came, and I had the adventure of traveling alone on the bus to Granville, changing buses at Glens Falls. But by the time I had passed three days in Aunt Lorna and Uncle Tonio's house, my most ardent desire was to be back on North Pearl Street. I felt out of place in the silent, childless house that Aunt Lorna kept immaculately tidy: a nervous cleanliness that seemed unnatural to me. It turned out that Uncle Tonio's 'plenty for a boy to do' began with mowing his lawn. Then he suggested that I go around the town asking people if they wanted their lawns mowed. 'Make a little money for yourself. It's better than taking hand-outs from the welfare.'

In Granville, as elsewhere in America, mowing the lawn and shoveling the snow were the man's major contribution to household chores, and he did both with more fuss and gadgetry than was necessary, so my only potential customers were old women living on their own. But Granville had lots of old women on their own because it was a quarry town, and slate quarrying is dangerous work that tends to skew populations towards a preponderance of widows. I walked around town knocking on doors and offering to do their lawns using their own lawn mowers, all of which turned out to be heavy antiques that hadn't been oiled in years and had never felt the harsh caress of a sharpener's stone. The going rate for a lawn was fifteen cents, and to save money the old women let their grass go until it was at least three inches high, so mowing it was really hard work. By the time I had slogged my way through the first lawn, I had a row of puffy blisters on each palm and the web of each thumb was raw and weeping. I was able to take only short bites in the long grass before it jammed the reel and obliged me to back off to get a run at the next short bite, throwing all my weight against the wooden handle of the mower with each short surge. My first lawn took all morning, then when I knocked on the door to collect my fifteen cents, the lady called my attention to my failure to trim around the edges and borders, and to rake up the grass and pile it neatly in back, and did I really intend to put that lawn mower away without cleaning it first? Would I treat my own mower that way? Mowers cost money, you know, and money doesn't grow on trees.

It took from after breakfast until lunch to do a lawn, then most of the afternoon to do a second one, if I was lucky enough to find another customer. The backs of my calves and the nape of my neck got so sunburned that I could only sleep on my stomach; and the blisters I got that first day burst again with every job and never got a proper chance to callous over.

Most of the old ladies I mowed for were so demanding and tight-fisted that I was surprised when one customer, a gaunt woman with the gimlet eye and the razor-thin lips of a storybook witch, gave me a glass of Kool-Aid and a nickel tip in addition to my fifteen cents. My very next client was a sweet old dear with a vague smile and pale blue eyes. When I finished her lawn she dumped fifteen pennies into my palm and, with a twinkle in her faded eyes, she asked, “Would you like a dime?” Assuming she was offering a tip, I said, thanks, that's very nice of you, so she took back the pennies and gave me a dime, all the while smiling and winking at me in an impish way that made it impossible for me to complain without seeming disrespectful and greedy. I'd been conned by an old lady! I'd made a nickel extra on the hag's lawn, then lost a nickel on the sweet old lady's anti-tip.

Throughout my 'vacation' I never made more than thirty cents a day, but I worked every day it didn't rain, except Sundays because Tonio said he'd be damned if any kid staying with him was going to take the Lord's day in vain. When I told him it was the Lord's name one took in vain, not His day, he muttered something about my being a wise-mouth, just like my mother... and crazy too, always talking to myself!

One day I was pushing a dull mower over a big corner lawn for a crabbed old woman who watched me from behind her curtains, as though I was going to steal her grass or something. The overgrown lawn was full of hidden twigs the previous day's storm had brought down from the trees, and these kept jamming the cutting blade, stopping the mower short and wrenching my wrists. It was miserable work: the air was heavy and muggy, sweat stung my eyes, my shoulders smarted where the old sunburn had peeled off leaving sensitive new skin, and the old blisters on my palms had broken and were weeping stickily. I was about halfway through when I heard a sound like ten thousand strips of bacon frying in a huge pan. This sound came sweeping down the street towards me, and before I could run for cover, the heaviest hailstorm I've ever known was ripping leaves off the trees, hissing into the grass, white ice pebbles bouncing up waist high. Gasping for breath and being stung by a thousand needles, I managed to get the mower back into the lady's shed, then I dashed to her porch and shouted through the screen door over the din that I'd come back to finish when the storm stopped, and I ran off. By the time I got back to Aunt Lorna's the hail had changed into a cold sleety rain and I was drenched and sneezing, so she put me into bed with a hot water bottle.

I was in bed for three days with a feverish summer cold. By the time I was well enough to sit out on the porch, it was only a couple of days before my return to Pearl Street. But first I had to finish the lawn I had partly done when that monster hailstorm came in. The half I had already mowed had grown a little while I was sick in bed, and the old battle-ax made me mow the whole lawn because she wasn't going to pay good money for a lawn that was uneven. The mowing was slow and difficult not only because the fever had left me weak but because the hail had knocked down a lot more twigs from her trees, and these jammed the mower even more often than before. It took me all day, and when I finished the woman gave me a glass of buttermilk as a cheapskate sort of tip. I've always hated buttermilk, but I drank it to spite her. It wasn't until I was walking back to Aunt Lorna's that I wondered if that had been stupid. What if it had been a glass of spit? Would I have drunk that to spite her, too?