The Crazyladies of Pearl Street Page 11

  Christmas presents, coffee, Virginia Baked Spam, these little indulgences and pleasures required money beyond our 35 per person per day, and this had to be made either by Mother working as a waitress, or by me carrying my home-made shoeshine box on rounds of the bars on Friday nights (black and brown polish only, no two-toned shoes). But even when things seemed their grimmest, my mother would assure my sister and me that one of these days we’d wake up and find ourselves on Easy Street.

  ‘Easy Street’ was one of my mother’s favorite songs. The surest indication that she had emerged from a spell of the blues was hearing her sing such up-beat songs as she cooked supper. The three of us sang together almost every night as she sat at the table darning and Anne-Marie and I did the supper dishes, me washing, she wiping, standing on a chair because she was so little. Among our favorites were those defiantly optimistic songs that appeared during the first years of the Depression. Not only did these songs urge you to live your life ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ but they insisted that it wasn’t all that bad to be poor, because ‘The Best Things in Life Are Free’, and love was among those finer things in life that were to be had on the cheap, like the man who ‘Found a Million-Dollar Baby (in a five-and-ten-cent store)’; so you should keep your chin up because ‘Beyond the Blue Horizon (waits a beautiful day)’, and all you had to do was to ‘Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams (and dream your troubles away)’.

  Occasionally, when she was down in the dumps, Mother would sing one of the embittered Depression songs, like ‘Remember My Forgotten Man’ or ‘Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?’

  In her heyday, my mother had had one of those quintessential symbols of the flapper ’Twenties, a ukulele. When the magic of short-wave brought Hawaii Calls! to our radio all the way from those distant islands, Anne-Marie would put on a grass skirt she had made from newspapers cut into long strips and she would hula with graceful, expressive hand movements while Mother strummed and fingered an imaginary ukulele and I imitated the falling whine of a Hawaiian guitar by humming in falsetto while blocking one nostril and flicking the other. Show Business!

  Pennies from Heaven...These Foolish Things...

  The Way You Look Tonight...Goody-Goody...

  It’s De-Lovely...The Music Goes Round and Round...

  My mother always attacked the housework chores with unbounded energy. Saturday was laundry day in our apartment, and I worked with her in the bathroom while clothes boiled on the gas stove and filled the kitchen with steam. Bending over our old-fashioned claw-footed bathtub I would rub the sheets up and down a corrugated washboard with such reckless vigor that I always skinned a couple of knuckles, which would stiffen and sting for half the forthcoming week. Doing the laundry in those days was not just a matter of washing, rinsing, wringing out, then hanging on the line; the job involved several operations that are either combined today or dismissed as unnecessary. There was also bluing, bleaching, boiling and starching. Not only my school shirts and Anne-Marie’s white school blouses got starched, but also the sheets and pillow cases. So a single item might be boiled, then bleached, then washed, then rinsed, then blued, then starched, then hung out to dry, then taken in, then sprinkled, then ironed, then folded away. My first encounter with the marvels of domestic technology designed to end housework drudgery was a new washboard we bought when our old one got too rusty to use. The corrugated scrub board was made of glass (no rust!), and this Nu-Mode Self-Soaping Glass Washboard (patent pending) introduced an innovation into the shallow wooden rectangle that held the bar of soap: holes had been drilled in the bottom board, allowing the soapy water to drain from the bar of Fels Naphtha and run down over the clothes being scrubbed on the corrugated glass. Nothing wasted. O, brave new world.

  The only thing Mother couldn’t do by herself was wring out the sheets because the strain of leaning over the edge of the bathtub always started a bout of coughing. So I used to help her, me twisting in one direction, she twisting in the other. When I was little, she was too strong for me and she would twist the sheet out of my grasp, which used to make me roar with frustration. We would coil the wrung-out sheets in the bottom of our clothes basket, which we would carry between us to the backyard to hang them out. Because Pearl Street traversed a hill that ran down to the river, the front windows of our apartment overlooked the street from a height of about ten feet, but we stepped out the door of our kitchen into a cement area that was four feet lower than the impermeable hard-pack of our sunless backyard. A central drain received the rainwater that cascaded down from beneath a rickety plank fence of weathered, dangerously splintery boards that separated our barren backyard from the alley where I used to play. One reel of our clothesline was attached to this fence, and the other was screwed into the frame of our kitchen door. Only people with first-floor apartments could hang out their washing while standing on the ground. Everyone else had to hang theirs from back windows using one line from the complex web of lines that looped off this way and that from the back of every building on the block. To hang out your clothes you had to bring them to your bedroom window, if you had a back apartment, or to the hall window on your floor if yours was a front apartment. You opened the window and leaned out to attach your wet clothes with clothespins, then you reeled them out far enough to attach the next pin, a difficult task if you were dealing with big things like sheets, which were always heavy with water, because no one on Pearl Street had a washing machine with rollers that squeezed the water out of sheets. Nor did our women want washing machines because they had all heard chilling urban factoids describing careless women who caught their fingers between the rollers and were dragged through the wringers up to the shoulder before their screams alerted passers-by. (Such are the dangers of being rich and so la-de-da as to need a machine to do your washing.) The reason the newspapers never carried stories about these ghastly accidents was that the big washing machine companies paid them to hush things up...or so we were assured.

  Threading wet clothes out through a window without letting them brush against the sill and pick up soot required skill, strength and, on windy days, a little luck, but there were times when reeling the clothes back in was even more difficult. In winter, the sheets froze stiff on the line, and the rigid rectangles would not fit back in through the window, so you had to cuff and punch them until they ‘broke’ and could be folded. All this work was done leaning halfway out an open window as high as four stories up, while your neighbors complained about the cold drafts you were letting in. And even when you managed to get your sheets in, they would become damp again as they thawed out, so you had to string them around your kitchen and bathroom, where they gave off waves of clammy moisture until finally they dried.

  When your house was back-to-back with the one on the next block, the far reel of your clothesline would be screwed into the woodwork of your back neighbor’s window, and hers into yours. These attachment points were always within reach of the windows so that repairs and replacements could be made and, in some particularly irritating cases, so that tangles could be unraveled after windy nights. Since people whose houses backed on one another’s did not, by definition, live on the same block and were therefore alien, this occasional need for cooperation involved negotiations with people you didn’t know. Sometimes friendships were established this way; but more often quite the opposite.

  Ole Buttermilk Sky...That Old Feeling...Remember Me...

  It Looks Like Rain in Cherry Blossom Lane...

  Rosalie...Harbor Lights...September in the Rain...

  I can see Mr Kane’s eyes, huge behind thick glasses. We were sitting on his side steps in the evening after the cornerstore was closed, having one of our talks as we looked out across what he ironically called ‘my garden’, a narrow strip of vacant lot, bare sooty earth that glittered with shards of broken glass, a clump of sumac growing out of a crack in the wall of a building, its prehistoric leaves turning over to show their light side when it was going to rain, and here and there a cl
ump of indestructible ironweed breaking through the hard-packed ground.

  These talks were neither regular nor frequent, perhaps four or five a year, but they went on as long as I lived on North Pearl Street. Most of them, and especially at first when I was seven or eight years old, consisted of Mr Kane amplifying on things he had heard on the short-wave radio that kept him in contact with what was happening in Warsaw, London, Madrid and Berlin. I picture him in the small hours of the night hunched over his radio, a shock of white hair caught in the head strap of his earphones, while his wife snores upstairs. These were, I believe, among the happiest moments of his life...certainly the most peaceful. I realize now that he must have been very lonely, isolated on North Pearl by his race and by his role as the block’s credit provider. Why else would he talk to a kid who could add nothing to the conversation but the occasional nod or hum to indicate attention?

  Our first talk was occasioned by something I said one spring evening just before closing time while I was buying a penny’s worth of Spanish Red Hots (three-a-penny cinnamon disks). It must have been a Saturday because that morning I had attended catechism class up at the priests’ house across from Saint Joseph’s Church. The class was taught by an intense young priest with pink-rimmed eyes, a scratchy voice and incandescent acne. After battering his way through the difference between complete contrition and incomplete contrition (which, as best I could make out, depended on whether you confessed your sins because you cherished Jesus Christ who was all good and deserving of all our love, or because, unspeakable coward that you were, you dreaded spending eternity in Hell), the priest asked if we had any questions, and seeing that I was about to pose one said, “Well then! Let’s all kneel and offer up prayers for the poor priests and nuns who are being martyred by those Godless, blood-thirsty Spanish Republicans.” So we said a few Hail, Marys and Our Fathers after which, ignoring my eagerly raised hand, he blessed us and we filed out into the street.

  I had wanted to hear more about these blood-thirsty Republicans. My mother never had anything good to say about Republicans, whom she described as a bunch of fat cats who were against everything President Roosevelt was trying to do for the poor, and who had caused the Depression by an evil act called ‘buying on margin’. I was willing to accept that any enemy of President Roosevelt was my enemy too, and that buying on margin was a base and unforgivable vice, but it seemed odd to me that when cataloguing the Republicans’ iniquities and misdeeds my mother had failed to mention the juicy fact that they were in the habit of butchering priests and nuns.

  I was in Mr Kane’s cornerstore just before closing time, negotiating to exchange my penny for two Spanish Red Hots and two Jelly Babies, both of which were three-a-penny candies. In the course of the babble-blur I kept up to prevent Mr Kane from adding up and realizing that I was trying to get one and a third cents worth of candy for a penny, I said I sure hoped these Spanish Red Hots weren’t made by Republicans.

  Mr Kane gave me the candy and, as he dropped my penny into the cash drawer, said, “So what’s all this about candy made by Republicans?”

  “Well, I mean...the Spanish Republicans?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You’ve heard about the Spanish Republicans?”

  “Sure. They kill priests and nuns.”

  “This is all you know about the Revolution?”

  “The Revolution?” I couldn’t understand what Spaniards had to do with the Revolution which, according to my mental swatchbook of historical images, had been fought out between brave Colonial Minutemen and Hessian mercenaries in red coats, while a bunch of frozen guys crossed the Delaware standing up in the boat, and Paul Revere rode through the night shouting, ‘The British are coming! The British are coming!’ so guys in Boston got dressed up as Indians and threw their tea into the ocean...oh, and there was something called the Stamp Act.

  Mr Kane closed his eyes and shook his head sadly. “It’s a crime against the future that the schools haven’t taught you about the most important event in the world today. Even you, a smart little boy, don’t have the slightest idea what’s going on. There should be a law against such ignorance.”

  “The most important thing in the world? Tell me about it.”

  “What’s the point?” He opened the door for me to leave, then followed me out, locking the door behind him.

  “Tell me.”

  As he pulled down the metal shutter and locked it, he said, “It’s too complicated.”

  “The Republicans are the bad guys, right?”

  “Wrong.”

  “But they murder priests and nuns.”

  “Yes, that happens sometimes. Out of rage. Out of frustration. There are evil men on both sides. And madmen, too. That’s the way it always is. If things were black and white, taking sides would be easy. But in life, good and evil are always in shades of gray, so it takes courage to pick a side. One must consider motives as well as deeds.”

  “But the Democrats wouldn’t kill priests.”

  “In Spain, the republicans and the democrats are the same people.”

  “What?” I knew that couldn’t be right.

  “And the revolutionaries are the fascists.”

  “Fascists?” I had never heard the word before.

  By this time, we had walked around the outside of the cornerstore. Mr Kane sat on the wooden steps that led to his side door and took a flat Bugler Cigarette Machine out of his shirt pocket. He limited himself to two cigarettes each day, one before work, one after, both of which he smoked sitting on his side steps because his wife wouldn’t let him smoke in the house. Perhaps his admirable self-control was reinforced by the complexity of the cigarette-making operation. First he pinched some shag-cut Bugler tobacco out of its blue tin and carefully distributed it across a little slot at the top of the machine, then he lifted a lever, which action rolled the tobacco into cigarette shape on a rubberized belt within. He licked the adhesive on a cigarette paper and placed it carefully into the slot, then he slowly lowered the lever, which turned the internal mechanism again and voila! a cigarette popped out. He trimmed off the little tufts of tobacco that hung out the ends of the cigarette with a clipper designed for the purpose, carefully brushed the clippings back into the tobacco can, then fished a wooden match out of his pocket, scratched it on the side of the step, lit up, and took a long draw, which he released slowly, his eyes closed as the harsh tobacco made his senses swim for a second. The voluptuously complicated sacrament involved hedonistic teasing and anticipation before satisfaction.

  After his second deep draw and slow exhale, he quietly sketched out the history of the Spanish Civil War up to that date. I learned that the bad guys, the Nationalists, were made up of businessmen, the army, land owners, and the Church, and they were trying to overthrow the elected government of good guys, the Republicans, who were workers, farmers, labor unionists, socialists, communists, anarchists, and a few middle-class liberals. He gave me thumbnail definitions of the various ‘ists’ and ‘isms’ in terms of what they thought the world ought to be like, and how they intended to bring that ideal state about.

  Mr Kane had the gift of being able to weave history into a good story, an adventure with heroes, villains, quests, danger, and dramatic-sounding names: Asturias, Franco, Negrn, Crdoba, Guernica. Fighting on the side of the Republic were the Soviet Union, Mexico and the George Washington and Abraham Lincoln Battalions of young Americans;13 helping the Fascists were Italian soldiers, Croix de Fer rightists from France, Ultra-Catholic Blue Shirts from Ireland, and the Condor Legion of German pilots who practiced tactics by bombing defenseless cities. All the people, places and events came in too thick a flow for me to remember in detail, but I got a feeling for the romance and tragedy of Spain.

  It grew dark as I listened, entranced and muddled in equal parts, to Mr Kane’s version of the causes and progress of the Civil War. From within his shop, his wife summoned him to supper in a sing-song, l
ong-suffering voice, although it was the first time she had called. I rose, stiff-butted from sitting so long. I could tell he enjoyed having someone who was interested in what life had taught him. I was about to dash across the street to my apartment when he called after me: “By the way! Don’t think you got away with anything. I know you cheated me out of a Jelly Baby. I’ve got my eye on you.”

  My Funny Valentine...Where or When...

  In the Still of the Night...The Nearness of You...

  You’re a Sweetheart...Little White Lies...A Foggy Day

  Albany must have been in a ten-year sartorial time warp, because I later discovered that few men of my age had worn knickerbockers as boys. But in my day, Albany boys wore knickers from the time they graduated from short pants until they entered the ninth grade. We never felt our knickerbockers were peculiar because all the boys in our old textbooks, most of which dated from the ’Twenties, wore them. For Catholic boys, the rites of passage from short pants to knickers and thence to long trousers were synchronized with religious events. First Holy Communion was celebrated in a short pants suit of white with a flowing white satin bow tie, and this was your last pair of short pants; from then on you wore knickers, until your first long-trouser’d suit for Confirmation. The following fall, having worn out your last knickers over the summer holidays, you emerged from the stylistic chrysalis in long trousers, a confirmed man capable of manly sins.

  Standard school dress for boys was matching corduroy knickers, jackets and caps, but in the poorer districts this ideal of matching clothes that fit was achieved only seldom and briefly because caps tended to get lost and knickers wore out more quickly than jackets, which were worn until they were tight in the chest and at least two inches of bony wrist dangled from the cuffs, then they were passed down to younger brothers and from family to family on the block. The widespread use of hand-me-downs that fit ‘well enough’, the practice of buying all clothes, including shoes, at least one size too big so they wouldn’t be too quickly outgrown, and the uncooperative tendency of kids to grow by spurts all combined to make our school clothes a medley of floppy and tight. One element of dress, the jacket for instance, might fit for a month or so as the boy grew through it, but the mathematical likelihood of shoes, jackets, knickers and caps all fitting at the same time was too slight to be a practicable ideal.