The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (64 page)

Another of Mother's favorite heroines was “Ma Perkins”, an old gal who had a lumberyard in Indiana or some such place, and whose friends and family were constantly seeking her wholesome advice and motherly solace to guide them through an endless stream of woes, illnesses, accidents, perfidies, swindles, and family tragedies. Through it all, Ma Perkins remained optimistic about human nature. Oh, sometimes she felt battered by wave after wave of tragedy and treachery, but she always managed to look on the sunny side of life... except, of course, for the six months or so when she was blind.

Next to the fruitful device of having the characters fall victim to amnesia, no disaster was so prevalent in Soapland as blindness. The soap operas must have copied effective gimmicks from one another because during the 1939/1940 season the airwaves were swept by an epidemic of blindness that gave the sound effects men unique chances to frighten the listeners with ominous approaching footsteps, or roaring traffic that the poor blind heroine couldn't protect herself from because she couldn't see! (Panic-stab on organ! Honeyed voice of the announcer reminds us to tune in to discover what happens tomorrow 'same time, same station'... Bridge to theme, then to a snappy commercial ditty: Rinso-white! Rinso-white! Happy little washday song!)

Soaps always had several tragedies going on at once, so there was something for the listener to worry about, even when one of the story lines had ground to its grim conclusion. This over-lapping structure produced some pretty complex moments, like when the heroine couldn't accept the rich, handsome, mysterious stranger's offer of marriage because she was being blackmailed for having stolen the letters that wrongly implicated her terminally-ill daughter in a plot to cheat the orphanage out of the money left to it by an unknown benefactor. As you no doubt guessed, one of the orphans was, in fact, the unacknowledged child of the doctor who had misdiagnosed the daughter's illness; and the unknown benefactor was the heroine's long-lost sister, who was only pretending to be dead to avoid anyone finding out that she had eloped with the heroine's daughter's ex-husband, who was... well, all the usual stuff.

Soaps relied heavily on the studio organ that provided not only the theme by which each soap was instantly recognizable but it also intensified the drama by means of such devices as the feathery organ 'bridges' that carried us from one locale to another, and the sudden stab of rich two-handed chords that emphasized a climactic moment or italicized a shocking revelation. The soap organist was descended from those splendidly versatile pit organists of the silent film era who, after warming up the audience with a 'follow the bouncing ball' sing-along, fleshed out the film with themes suggesting hectic action, deep sadness, mellow calm, or zany nonsense; and with musical analogues for 'morning' or 'springtime' or 'evil intentions' or 'young love'; and leitmotifs for characters and past incidents; all the while synchronizing a stock of 'sound effect' stops for hoof beats, train whistle, falling rain, etc. In both the silent film and the soap opera, the organist often contributed more to dramatic effect than the actors.

I remember once hooting with laughter (and getting a recriminating stare from my mother) when, after weeks of tension and worry, we learned that Lolly-Baby's terminal disease was, in fact, yet another of those misdiagnoses that were at that moment a feature of soapland's medical establishment, allowing everyone to emote and lament at full throttle for a couple of weeks, without the producer's having to replace a character. Another useful accident was a broken leg, which was best when the injury occurred in the course of saving the life of someone who was unconscious and therefore never knew that his brave savior was the very woman he had so woefully wronged when he fell in love with her ungrateful best friend the night she was away helping a neighbor bring an unexpected pregnancy to its natural conclusion during the worst combination flood/earthquake/thunderstorm of the century, (such meteorological 'production values' being relatively cheap to stage, as they were created by the sound-effects man). Nothing so gripped the bleeding-but-still-throbbing heart of the devoted soap fan as much as a heroine being immobilized by a broken leg, and unable to get to a crucial telephone call that rang and rang and rang unanswered until the sound was enfolded into the closing organ theme, as the creamy voice of the announcer posed the question that was tantalizing listeners all over America: ...Who on earth could be calling Ma Perkins at this time of night?!

Mother used to accuse me of being heartless when I couldn't stomach the bathetic depths of sentimentality that she found so touching, so true to life (to her life, as she saw it). So she particularly hated it when I said something sarcastic about the woes and tribulations her heroines suffered, and suffered, and suffered. (Mother's approximate pronunciation of 'sarcastic' injected a certain bitterness into my scoffing: she used to accuse me of being 'sourcastic'.)

But then, my mother was moved by Judy Garland, who would bravely sing on, a catch of tears in her voice, although her heart was breaking. That heart-broken catch in her voice constituted the entire range of Miss Garland's histrionic gift, and while it worked for some people, I couldn't help wanting to shout: Oh, for Christ's sake, Judy, get a grip on yourself! Mickey Rooney was another of the hokey, lump-in-his-throat actors that I yearned to throttle with my bare hands. And when Judy and Mickey were together in those peppy, low-budget small town musicals in which they raised the money for the orphanage by 'putting on a show', I just couldn't stay in the theater. There ought to be warning labels on such films to protect people who suffer from diabetes.

On Saturday afternoons, my mother listened to the Thinking Woman's soap opera, One Man's Family. A sure sign that One Man's Family was head and shoulders above the common run was its pace. I had already inferred from the kinds of books teachers revered and praised that slow pace was a salient characteristic of greatness in literature, and it used to sadden me that so few 'great' books were also good. One Man's Family was obviously of superior quality because it was the slowest-paced radio program ever created. Its episodes had titles like: Book twelve, Chapter Eight: 'Father Barber Wonders If He Should Take a Walk'. And that, my fellow sufferers on a school boy's sick bed, would be all that happened.

And when we realize that soap has gone downhill since its early years on radio...

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35. '....well-intentioned myth' (p. 214)

I liked the stories well enough, but I was embarrassed when teachers told me things that I knew were untrue. I remember an intensely sincere nun telling my class that when she was a girl she had experienced a visitation from an aunt who had died and gone to purgatory (as all of us, except for saints, must). This aunt appeared at the doorway of the nun's bedroom and begged her to do everything she could to avoid dying with even the slightest stain of sin on her soul, because the torments of purgatory, while ultimately beneficial, were so horrible that she didn't want her darling niece to experience a single second of it. After the aunt disappeared, the little girl lit her lamp and discovered on the frame of the door a handprint burned into the wood, so hot was it from the flames of purgatory. While some of the kids in class were distraught by the prospect of such a punishment, I literally twisted in my chair with embarrassment that an adult teacher would stand there and bare-facedly hand me such crap. And a nun, too! I was embarrassed on her behalf, and angry that she had made me feel such embarrassment.

Some years later, when I realized that I was no longer a believing Catholic, or even a Christian, it was with only slight surprise, for I had released my belief gradually, without intending to lose it or even noticing it go. I didn't undergo one of those scarifying crises of conscience that many intellectual Catholics experience when the comfortable assumptions of a lifetime conflict with observed hypocrisy and the dictates of reason: those searing collisions of mind with spirit that convert many ex-believers into embittered proselytizers for the opposite and equally unprovable position, atheism. Such evangelists for atheism end up ranting on about how the born-again enthusiast is not only concerned with his own salvation but is intent upon assuring yours by means of prohibition, censorship, and legal constraint; and we hear much about the tooth-gnashing hatred that the pious interventionist claims to reserve for the sin, but unfailingly heaps upon the sinner, and about those zealous anti-abortionists who murder doctors to demonstrate their veneration for the Right to Life.

No, I simply realized one day that I hadn't thought about faith or sin or God for a long time, and if I were to draw up a list of my current concerns, values and interests, gods and religions would appear nowhere in the first twenty pages... perhaps thirty. My spiritual appetites were not focused on personal salvation, but on the wonders of art and literature. So I didn't become an angry, wounded atheist; I became a mildly indifferent non-theist.

And yet, I still enjoyed the calm and peace of an empty church when I had something to think over, and even today I find the great cathedrals of Europe to be inspiring manifestations of human aspiration, imagination, and soaring creativity.

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36. '...as much as it impressed her' (p.217)

Although words, language and literature fascinated me, and although, at this period, the nun who was my English teacher was always either at the edges of my mind or the center of my dreams, English was not my favorite subject in school. It was History that attracted the born story-maker in me, for what is history but a rambling story that attempts to explain the past in ways that justify the present? I seldom missed a broadcast of The Cavalcade of America, which offered dramatized (and thoroughly sanitized) biographies of American statesmen and leaders of industry and commerce. Unfortunately, the history taught in school was mostly about rulers, wars, and treaties (bosses, fights and deals, as I saw it). I would have preferred to study things like the history of urbanization, the history of commerce, the history of medicine... and of illness, the history of transportation, the history of wealth... and of poverty, the history of agricultural technology, the history of individual political empowerment, the history of dominant ideas... and fads, cults, and mass hypnoses.

On my own, outside the obligations of school, I memorized the kings of England from William the Bastard to George VI, the American presidents through to FDR, and the rulers of France from Charlemagne to the fall of the Second Empire. (I didn't bother to learn the presidents of the Third Republic, as they changed every couple of months.) For some reason, I also memorized the names and associated virtues of the Nine Worthies (although how Godfrey of Bouillon (Courage) managed to get himself on an equal footing with Julius Caesar, King Arthur, and Charlemagne was more than I could understand. What did he do? Invent a kind of soup?).

I sometimes resented the time wasted memorizing the dates of bosses, fights, and deals for history class, but later I found those dates useful as chronological armatures upon which I could arrange events in intellectual history, art history, or the history of science and technology, and valuable for establishing conjunctions between and among these more useful ways of slicing up the story of mankind.

My interest in history was stimulated by the feeling that Albany was the very cockpit of American history. Fort Nassau, the Dutch river port that became Albany, was built in 1614, six years before the founding of the Plymouth colony. From the first the beaver-trading Dutch were in contact with their dominant Indian neighbors, the Iroquois. It was the Iroquois Confederacy that provided Europeans, and ultimately the neonate American nation, with a working example of a federal union in which decisions were made in open council by the consent of the governed. This was the sole example available to the Colonists, as the methods of governance in Norse Iceland were not known at that time. It is not without significance that the new nation used the Iroquoian symbol of power, the eagle, as its national emblem, and this 'American' eagle is depicted clutching in its left claw the traditional Iroquoian symbol of strength-in-unity, a bundle of arrows, the message being that while an enemy might be able to break one, none has the strength to break them all together. (One of Cleo's ironies is the fact that a similar symbol of strength-in-unity, the ancient Roman fascis, a bundle of rods with a broad bladed axe bound in with them, became the emblem of Mussolini's fascism.)

Not only was much of the Revolution fought along the natural invasion route from Montreal to Albany, but all kinds of interesting people had lived and worked in the three-city conurbia of which Albany is the hub and the smaller cities of Schenectady and Troy the satellites.

Schenectady was the eastern depot of the Erie Canal, which connected the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, bringing the agricultural produces of the West to the seaport of New York City and making that city, despite its eccentric location, the nation's center of trade and commerce, hence of stock and bond trading. Schenectady was chosen by Thomas Edison in 1886 to be the home of the Edison Machine Works, which evolved into General Electric, which, with its experimental laboratories, introduced the Age of Electronics that accounted for most of America's post-smokestack industrial success.

By the 'Thirties, the smallest of the 'tri-cities', Troy, was already in decline from its early glories as a center of the early iron and steel industry. It was better known as the home of the Troy collar, a detachable celluloid device invented by a Troy housewife that became a standard item of male dress for almost a hundred years. Even in my day, advertisements featuring 'the man in the Troy shirt' offered the 1930s ideal of male beauty, with his granite profile, his strong chin, and his neatly parted hair. But I was more interested in Troy's claim to immortality as the home of Samuel Wilson, a tall, rangy Yankee meatpacker with a white goatee. This entrepreneur, who was called 'Uncle Sam' by the workers he treated with gruff paternalism, secured a profitable contract to provide salt beef for the army during the War of 1812. The barrels were stamped 'U. S. Beef' to identify them for the U. S. Army, but the workers and shippers called it 'Uncle Sam's corned beef', and an American national symbol was born to rival England's John Bull and France's Marianne. The scowling, sinewy old Yankee in top hat and tailed coat of red, white, and blue appeared in cartoons in Paris and London that ridiculed the bumptious hick's cocksure swagger and 'don't tread on me' orneriness, while in America, enlistment posters and war bond drives used the same figure to embody self-assured determination and the old New England virtues of square dealing, steadfast purpose, and personal rectitude.