The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (57 page)

Her ship had come in, and it was laden with the success she had been denied.

After my health declined to the point of being able to work only two or three hours a day, and only with the support of oxygen, I found it difficult to live up to my image as a scrappy outsider going to Fistcity with publisher after publisher over literary, social or political matters. How tough and independent can you be when your wife has to bathe you and help you dress? But I still have good moments. Sometimes, when I have been bundled up and installed on the terrace of my cafe to read or to write letters, I look up and see my wife striding across the alée of our Basque village towards me, her cape flapping behind her. As she approaches she smiles at me, there is a rush of warmth around my heart, and my spirits lift.

My ship came in, too, and it was laden with love.

Mendiburua, Pays Basque, 2004

CODA

I have learned that love is absolute and unquantifiable. The person who asks 'How much do you love me?' or the child who says 'You love my brother more than you love me.' misapprehends the nature of love. It isn't that each person possesses a finite quantity of love to be apportioned among those he loves. The love a man feels for his life-mate, or for one of his children, is not diminished by the love he feels for another of his children, or for a brother, or an old friend. It is as though there were a separate space in one's heart for each beloved person, and that space is brim-full of love. When another child is born, a new pocket of love opens in the heart devoted fully and solely to that child. There is only one way to love... fully.

After I die, the love I have for my wife and children and grandchild and those whom they love will continue on. When they need me, when they are frightened or overburdened, I shall be there, just out of sight around the corner of time, and they will feel my presence with the same inexplicable certitude that one feels the eyes of a watcher in a crowd. I shall always be there when they want me, and never be there when they don't. I shall console them and fortify them with hope and with the certain knowledge that they are loved.

In addition, old carnival con that I am, I shall find ways to intercede on their behalf. Using the camouflage of circumstance, coincidence, luck and accident, I shall advance their projects as I befuddle and thwart those of their opponents and ill wishers, or of those who are simply inadvertent obstacles.

When, full of years and love, my wife joins me, our essences will commingle, and united we shall watch over our loved ones, sending them peace and hope, cosseting and loving them, listening to them when they wish to share anything into the darkness over their beds. And after the last of my children dies... only a moment in the cosmic flow of time... and they in turn are watching over and supporting their beloved ones from beyond place and time; the commingled swirl of essence that is my wife and I will enfold any of our children who want to come with us, and we shall cease to exist... except for one another.

There is no heaven in my vision of eternity; no mythology, no gods, no rewards, no punishments. There is only love.

Biographical notes and more can be found here: ? HYPERLINK “http://www.trevanian.com/tdesk/tbio.htm” ?www.trevanian.com/tdesk/tbio.htm?

Footnotes

1. '...was Bog Irish' (p.5)

...is one of those terms, like canuck or nigger, that one who shares the ethnic distinction can get away with using, but outsiders must use gingerly and sympathetically, if at all. But the fact is my new neighbors on Pearl Street were bog Irish... as boggy as it gets.

So who were and what are the bog Irish?

Despite the scowling mistrust with which the Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment greeted the flood of Celtic Catholics that were driven to America by the Potato Famine, despite our employment of Irish men as nameless and unremembered draft animals in the digging of our early canals and railroad beds, and despite the injustices and indignities to which they were subjected, most Irish blended thoroughly and quickly into the homogenizing American melting pot and by the third generation found their place among our entrepreneurs, bankers, lawyers, teachers, publishers and, above all, politicians, for they seem to possess innately the skills and vices of the professional politician... and car dealers, property developers, journalists, television evangelists, and junk bond merchants.

So most Irish arrivals were integrated smoothly into the American family where they succeeded both in finding opportunities and in making contributions, but a few didn't make it into the homogenizing mainstream and ended up trapped in the undertow of economic dependency where they remained generation after complaining generation, some dependent upon will-numbing welfare, others dependent upon the political machines of Boston, New York or Chicago where minimal education, minimal-effort sinecures in municipal jobs like the police force, the fire department, or those urban maintenance crews that require eleven men to fill in a pot hole: two Irishmen to watch, two to oversee the watchers, two to make a record of the project, two to keep bystanders at a distance, two to be those bystanders... and a Latino guy to fill in the hole.

The over-paid, under-worked metropolitan fiefdoms of the police and the firefighters (both of whom treat their jobs as inheritances to be passed on within their families) join the welfare dependent bog Irish to constitute the major support of the IRA terrorists, while most Irish-Americans, although revealing their Gaelic origins by waxing moistly sentimental at the mention of the old country, take the United States to be their home. If they had to choose, they would act to benefit the US, rather than Ireland.

Jewish-Americans have similar conflicting allegiances to work out, and I'm sure the heart-and-mind tug of war will require hard thinking and sinewy sleights of mind.

Two relatively new nations on the rim of Europe, but essentially outside of European history, both with conservative religion at their core, both centered in urban, northeastern America, both with great historical reasons to complain and vast native capacities for complaint, both producing difficult options for their Americans.

It was the integrated Irish majority that coined the term 'bog Irish' to describe this minority from whom they sought to distinguish and distance themselves. When we arrived on North Pearl, the street had been a sump of dependency and rancor for nearly a century. Its people viewed welfare as a natural right, a merited compensation because they had somehow been 'left out' of the American scramble for material success. Their frustration manifested itself in petty crime, jealous vandalism, and flashing rages of violence, mostly turned against their wives and children. So addicted were they to social dependency that it was impossible to pry them away from it. Having elevated their dole money to a natural right, when an opportunity for real work appeared, they were reasoning something like this:

“So, let's see here. This job offers five dollars an hour for a forty hour week. That's what? ...two hundred a week? And I'd have to give up my welfare check of a hundred fifty each week. So I'd be making fifty dollars for forty hours of work, which would be about a buck an hour! Well, I'm damned if I'll work for a buck an hour! What the hell do they think I am... a buck an hour! If any bastard behind some desk somewhere thinks that I...!”

Thus the dole-dependent vent their seething low-grade background fevers of resentment and rancor built up over generation after generation of public handouts that bred hopelessness, helplessness, sloth, and incompetence.

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2. '...in a bar brawl' (p. 13)

Today, the brick row of seven identical houses that included our apartment at 238 would be described by a real estate agent trying to flog re-gentrified property to a two-job yuppie couple as '...retaining many stylistic elements of Georgian urban domestic construction'.

In Albany, as in most northeastern American cities, little housing was specifically built for the poor until the social and aesthetic disasters of post-World War II 'urban renewal'. Before then, the poor lived in rickety, jerry-built wooden tenements that soon fell victim to fire, neglect, vandalism and rot, or they took over houses abandoned by the middle class, who slipped away from old Albany-on-the-Wharfside into newer and more fashionable residential developments to the north and west,* leaving their once proud homes to be broken up into apartments by slum landlords who bought them on the cheap, maintained them minimally, and made nasty little fortunes from wave after wave of immigrants, first from Ireland, then from Mediterranean and Slavic Europe, then Blacks from the American south, and finally families from the Hispanic and Asian diasporas, all of whom in their turn crowded into the narrow, noisy, noisome streets, glad to find something they could afford.

* The less desirable districts were almost always in the south or east ends of town, and the 'better' neighborhoods of northeastern American cities were (and still are) usually the west side or the north end of town. The only exceptions to this rule are cities lying on the eastern bank of a river.

The reason for this tendency is neither mysterious nor arcane. In the eastern half of the United States, most rivers flow from north to south, or from west to east. Therefore, downstream is usually south, east, or southeast; and being downstream of a city was both unpleasant and insalubrious before modern sewage treatment.

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3. '...that I was an Indian too' (p. 24)

About this word, Indian.

When referring to themselves, most Indians prefer 'Indian' to 'native American', a neologism inflicted on them by liberal thought-police. Although 'Indian' was an error made by Europeans who stumbled over the New World on their way elsewhere, it's what the North American Indian has called himself, in pride and in hurt, for longer than the two hundred years that the United States of America has existed.

More precisely, Indians say 'Indian' when referring to pre-European Americans in a general way. The word most tribes use to indicate their own people would translate as 'the people', or 'human beings' or 'mankind'. My own family were Onondagans of the Iroquois nation, and 'Iroquois' (a slap-dash French spelling of Indian sounds) would translate as 'the people'. This assumption that 'we are the people' is only natural because, before the arrival of the White, both tribal memory and daily experience put the tribe at the center of creation.

A few tribe names are descriptive (Nez Pierce, for example), and some were spitefully inflicted on tribes by their enemies or victims (Apache, for one), but if these names eventually gained common usage, it was because the vilified tribe wore the title with pride in the realization that they were strong and dreaded enough to have earned the stigma of opprobrium. (This phenomenon of the pejorative tag being worn proudly by those it was intended to disparage is fairly common: Impressionists, for example, or Rebs, or Yanks.)

There were also a few odd or silly, Euro-cultural names inflicted on tribes by the Whites (the noble Romans of the Seneca tribe, is a case in point), and occasionally the belittling names did not involve a warrior trait, as when Iroquois-speakers described their northern neighbors as raw-meat-eaters: Es-ki-mo.

It is the diehard Politically Correcter-than-thou that seeks to foist 'native American' on Indians. The only Indians who prefer 'native American' are those for whom being Indian is a profession: Indians doing hokum lecture tours through Britain, or Indian politicians, or Indian-culture con men who flog 'Indian healing', CD's of Indian flutes and Meditation Drums, and all the rest of the flimflam, to say nothing of those who seek excuses to get stoned on cactus and mushrooms behind the shield of 'native American religion'.

But most Indians are not self-seeking politicians, fakers, con men, god-hustlers or druggies, and they prefer to be called simply 'Indians', because race is not foremost in the Indian's view of his cultural setting. Like most people, Indians think of themselves primarily as members of a family and secondly in terms of their work and calling. Only thirdly would they describe themselves as members of a tribe. Fourthly, they are a part of the great, widely heterogeneous and culturally diverse migrant pattern of pre-Columbian people in North America that they call 'Indians'. And lastly they are Americans, or Canadians. Thus, my own grandfather was first the head of his branch of the LaPointe family, second a railroad man, third a half-blood Onondagan Iroquois, fifth an Indian, sixth a Canadian/American, and only seventh, if even that, a Catholic and a democrat.

An observation for which I offer no reason: I have never met a North American Indian who felt any fraternal propinquity to Central and South American Indians, despite the many parallels in pre-historic migration patterns, and similarities in mistreatment at the hands of the White invader with his firestick, his iron armor and his horse. Indians of the far north have more fellow feeling for Mongolian tribesmen in northeast Asia than with 'Indians' living in the jungles of Central America.

(See also ? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note69#note69” ??footnote 69?)

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4. '...half of the next day' (p. 40)

When I was little and walking hand in hand with Mother, she would squeeze my hand three times every time we approached a street corner. When I asked, she told me it was a secret code for the words 'I love you', but later she confessed that it was also to alert me to the danger of traffic, because I was always deeply lost in daydreams. When my sister came along, Mother sent the same three-squeeze 'I love you' to her when they crossed streets.