The Crazyladies of Pearl Street Page 12

  New (too large) knickers were bought, inherited, or bartered for each year just before school started. The cheapest place to buy school clothes was JC Penney, where Weaver Overhead Cash Carriers zinged along on wires attached to the ceiling, bringing little canisters containing money and sales slips to a central cashier’s nest suspended overhead, and the change came zinging back down to clerks on the floor from the gods of commerce above. We had to save up for the school shopping trip for at least three months because in addition to clothes there were school supplies to buy: protractors, rulers, pencils, erasers that were soft and pink on one end for pencil and gritty and white on the other for ink (but they didn’t really erase ink, only shredded the paper), a couple of dip pens with cork grips, a little blue box of Crown nibs which always got splayed because in my efforts to write quickly I pushed down too hard, a bottle of blue-black ink, as many free blotters with store advertising on them as you could get away with and a brand-new ring notebook that you promised yourself you would keep neat—and this time for crossyourheartandhopetodie sure! This year you would not doodle in it, or make up secret codes, or start writing stories that had nothing to do with school. But, of course...

  By the end of the school year the knickers had become too short to be buckled below the knee, so they were worn through the summer vacation without socks, something like long, ungainly shorts. No matter how hot it got, no boy on our block went around without his cap. We were convinced that nothing looked so fine and sassy as a cap worn slued to the side of the head or with its brim low over the eyes. Nuns, mothers and teachers never tired of telling us to put our caps on straight, which we would do, until they were out of sight.

  What a dapper lot we were in summer. Cap bills tugged down because you looked tougher with your narrowed eyes peering out, short knickers with buckles flapping if not missing, no socks to cover skinny shins embossed with bruises that were blue at first, then yellowish, and finally gray.

  No one wore denims (which were not then called jeans) except cowboys in the movies whose denims had three-inch cuffs over their boots. The legs of jeans were all the same length, long enough for tall men, so the shorter you were, the thicker or wider your cuffs had to be. Comic hicks wore denim bib overalls, chewed on blades of straw and rocked up on their toes as they said things like ‘yessiree bob’. No one on Pearl Street would have been seen dead in denims.

  Nice Work If You Can Get It...

  They Can’t Take That Away from Me...

  Love Walked In...Our Love Is Here to Stay...

  Johnny One Note...The Lady Is a Tramp...

  The ice man came down our street twice a week in summer, his horse-drawn wagon dripping melt water. People who wanted ice put cards in their windows, right side up for a 25-pound piece, upside down for a 50-pound piece. Nobody’s icebox was big enough to hold a 50-pound piece, so if someone’s ice card was upside down that meant they were having a party and wanted to put ice and bottles of beer into a wash basin. Mrs Kane’s fertile imagination manufactured the rumor that an ice card put sideways into a window meant that the woman wanted service of another kind from the ice man. I don’t think any woman on the block actually believed this, but they always let their eyes slide over the windows opposite, checking for sideways ice cards...just in case. Our ice man, an Italian with bulging, writhing muscles and a neck wider than his head, would grab a block of ice with his hinged tongs and with one smooth motion slide it off the back of the wagon and up onto his shoulder which was protected by a thick piece of leather. He’d carry it up to the apartment with an ice card in its window, leaving his old horse to wait in the breathless city heat, its head down, a shoulder muscle fluttering like a tic in the corner of a tired eye. As soon as the ice man was out of sight, kids would descend on the wagon, some to dabble their hands in the cold melt water and pat it onto their faces and arms, while older boys used their jackknives to chop off slivers of ice for sucking before the ice man returned and chased them off, bellowing hideous threats, all the more dreadful for being in Italian.

  The boy whose responsibility it was to empty the water pan under the icebox in summer would get engrossed in some story game or radio program until a heel-skid in a trickle of water on the kitchen floor brought his attention to his duties, which he had to attend to quickly if his slackness were to pass unnoticed. He had two options, the one slow, the other dangerous. He could carefully dip water out of the pan with a cup, making many trips from beneath the icebox to the sink, until the level of the water pan was low enough that he could carry it over to the sink without making a mess, or he could gamble and try to slide the brim-full pan out slowly, slowly, without letting it slop over the edge (not easy because the pan always stuck to the linoleum), then pick the pan up and walk to the sink carefully, carefully, with short steps calculated to break up the slosh-rhythm of the water. The first was the prudent method, the second was what the boy always did; and the water, of course, always slopped over the boy’s clothes and onto the floor, and he ended up having to put the pan back down and dip the water out cup by cup, slopping a good bit in the process, then wipe up the floor (including the long evil-smelling reach under the icebox) then rinsed out his mother’s favorite coffee cup, the total cost in time and effort being roughly three times what the prudent way would have been. But you never know. Maybe the next time...

  The ice man was also our coal man in September each year because that was when central heating began in the apartments, and it continued until Easter, regardless of the weather. Through fall and winter he delivered coal in the same wagon, pulled by the same horse, which stood with its head down as its master and fellow beast of burden carried hundred-pound sacks of coal on his back, wearing a kind of hood made from a burlap coal sack over his head. Nobody used ice in winter. Everyone nailed an orange crate to the side of a window and things like milk were kept there, although the milk often froze in the bottle, expanding and causing a little tower of frozen cream to lift the cap off. This free ‘ice cream’ was treasured by kids, who would try to wake up early to get it before other kids in the family did, but mothers complained that this left them with nothing but skimmed milk.

  In each building one renter was responsible for taking care of the boiler, banking it with coal each night and stoking it up again in the morning. In the winter of our second year, Mother managed to get this job in our building, and during the subsequent winters the rent agent forgave us the five dollar surcharge we had to pay over our rent allowance in return for four trips down to the basement each day to shake down the ashes and shovel in coal, then to put the ashes into the battered ash cans we set out on the curb to be collected once a week. That worked out to something like four cents for each time we tended the fire, but we were glad to have the extra money through the heating season, which began about the time school started, just when we needed the money for school supplies and clothes. Attached to the job of tending the furnace was the chore of sweeping and mopping all the halls and stairways. From Easter to Labor Day there was no heat, so the five dollars a month was reduced to two to cover the hall cleaning. When Mother was sick, I took over tending the boiler, a wearisome chore in the early years when I was small and the coal shovel was so big and heavy that I couldn’t lift it with more than a quarter load of coal, so stoking the furnace took me a long time, particularly when we were low on coal, and it was a long walk from the furnace to the little pile remaining at the back of the bunker.

  The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down...

  The Love Bug Will Bite You (if you don’t watch out)...

  Too Marvellous for Words...

  I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm...

  Mr Kane and I were sitting on his side steps overlooking his urban garden of sooty dirt, broken glass and ironweed as he smoked his evening cigarette. He had been hearing disturbing things from daring amateur short-wave operators in Europe, and he described to me the indignities and injustices the Nazis were inflicting upon Jews. (Ev
en Mr Kane didn’t know about the nastier crimes at that time.) His voice was sad rather than angry, a tone of fatigue that was centuries deep. I asked why the Germans let their leaders do these things, and he told me that for more than two thousand years Jews had served their European hosts as scapegoats after natural disasters and as whipping boys for personal failure, and he gave me brief narrative glimpses of crusaders running wild through mediaeval ghettoes, the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, pogroms in Russia. When I praised the way he described these things, as though he had been there himself, he said, “But, I was. I was there.”

  “You were there, Mr Kane?”

  “If you’re a Jew, you are wherever Jews are persecuted.”

  I sensed something profound in that...but I didn’t quite get it and I was uneasy with the muted passion of it, so I changed the subject.

  “Does ‘nazi’ mean something in German?”

  “Yes. It’s short for National Socialist.” He sniffed an ironic chuckle. “They are, of course, the very opposite of socialists. Their natural spiritual allies are the captains of industry, the landed classes and the military establishment.”

  “What is a socialist, then?”

  “Well...me. I’m a socialist.” And he went on to describe his very personal and quixotic brand of socialism, which he called ‘enterprise socialism’. According to him, the classic socialist’s insistence on public ownership of the means of producing wealth was a serious error because it overlooked such basic qualities of human nature as the desire to accumulate good things and pass them on to one’s children. He explained that the capitalist believes that, after defense of the nation, the primary concern of government is to facilitate ‘the pursuit of happiness’, meaning the acquisition of wealth, property, and comforts; while the socialist views government’s principal task, after defense of the nation, to be the welfare of the people, which, by the Darwinian nature of things, means particularly the welfare of the poor, the old, the weak and the disadvantaged.

  In Mr Kane’s ‘enterprise socialism’ such basic human rights as medical care and the best education your mind is able to absorb would be paid for, but not provided by, the government. The government would give vouchers (Mr Kane called them ‘health tickets’ and ‘school tickets’) with which individual citizens would ‘pay’ whatever private doctor, medical service, or educational institution they thought was right for them and their children. Experience had taught Mr Kane that everything run by the state is run badly, because the overriding motivation of the politician is to remain in office at all costs, and the guiding imperatives of the bureaucrat are to escape responsibility, dodge problems, and gather power to himself.14

  “And all of this...tickets for free doctors and hospitals and schools...this is what socialism is?” I asked.

  “Well...it’s my kind of socialism.”

  “And there are people out there trying to make all this happen?”

  “Not many, alas. But who knows? You, maybe, one of these days. And when it’s your time to try to set the world aright, remember this: when it comes to providing basic necessities like health care and education, you need both the efficiency of capitalist competition and the compassion and humanity of socialism. The money must be made by Capitalists and spent by Socialists.”

  “...Jeez.”

  Where Are You?...Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off...

  Shall We Dance?...That Old Feeling...Caravan...

  ‘The Block’ is a geographic concept; but not solely or even primarily so. The Block is a cluster of cultural, ethnic, social, tribal and economic characteristics. People were identified in terms of what block they came from, and the block also served as a basic unit of social measurement; a really tough kid was ‘the meanest guy on the block’, or a girl might be described as ‘the prettiest girl on the block’...or the plainest. If a girl from your block was unattractive but nice, she was called plain; if she came from another block, she was ugly. And if she was very unattractive but very nice, then everyone assumed she would become a nun and the whole block felt proud of her...but a little sorry for her, too.

  Blocks had individual personalities. There were good blocks where people cared about and stood up for one another, and mean blocks where they didn’t. There were ‘ritzy’ blocks where many of the men had jobs, and dangerous blocks where you could get beaten up for straying onto alien turf; there were old people’s blocks where children got yelled at for just looking around too hard, and there were Black blocks, Jewish blocks, Polish blocks, Italian blocks, Irish blocks, each with its characteristic ambience, smell and rules of conduct. And then, there was your own block, where things smelled as things ought to smell, and where you didn’t dare cut up too wild because everybody knew your name and where you lived.

  You were used to the smells of your own block, which in time your nose identified as neutral. This made the richer neighborhoods, which were clean and odorless, smell flat and insipid by comparison; so no smell was a kind of smell too. All the poor blocks had the basic slum basso ostinado I had met when I first stepped inside 238: mildew, leaking gas, Lysol and rat feces, with grace notes of baby diaper, lye soap and sweat, and through these were threaded the cooking smells that had soaked into the plaster of the hallways: Polish sausage, Irish cabbage, the sharp tang of Black people’s greens, the lonely metallic smell of Jewish cooking with its goose grease and fish, the splendid olfactory symphony of Italian food. When something brought you into the hallways of blocks other than your own, you found the cooking smells odd and alien. And rather ominous.

  The most salient characteristic of any block was its ethnicity. South Street, for instance, was Black and Jewish, the former crowded into decrepit tenements, owned by the latter, who lived over their rather seedy pawnshops, liquor stores and corner groceries. The Black block I knew best was called Blacktown, and was not a block in the strictest geographic sense, but a tangle of short streets—De Witt, Rathbone, Lawrence—surrounded by warehouses and light industry. Some Sundays after mass, I would pass through Blacktown on my way to a deserted brickyard down by the river docks where there was a huge pile of sand that I used as the Sahara in the intense, day-long Foreign Legion games I used to play all alone...except for my comrades of the Legion and several thousand very angry Arabs eager to throw off the cultural benefits of French imperialism. With its scattering of run-down brick houses, a grocery store, a barbershop and three storefront churches, Blacktown was a transplanted southern hamlet in the heart of a northern city, and it felt different from those neighborhoods in which Albany’s Negroes had lived for as long as anyone remembered. The soft-spoken residents of Blacktown were recent arrivals, having been attracted north during the First World War when Whites rushed into profitable war work, leaving many hard, dirty, undignified jobs unfilled. Although they suffered from mass unemployment when the Depression struck and their jobs were lost on the rule of ‘last hired, first fired’, Blacktown maintained its gentle, old-fashioned ambience. After its ministers, the leaders of Blacktown were its uniformed railroad sleeping car attendants who had traveled widely and knew something of the world, as their air of unspoken wisdom revealed. These ‘Georges’ (all sleeping car attendants were called George) had a union of their own, and in Blacktown they set a tone of dignity, reliability and responsibility. Their opinions mattered, and their approval was sought.15

  I never felt threatened (as one might today) as I passed through Blacktown on Sunday mornings, on my way to the Sahara, but I did feel intrusive and glaringly white. People sitting out on their wooden stoops would interrupt their soft-voiced gossip and watch me walk by, then start talking again after I had passed; and little kids would stop skipping rope or playing finger games and look at me with big-eyed, disconcertingly frank curiosity until I was well down the street and they felt free to get on with their play.

  I was intrigued by the storefront churches with hand-painted bible pictures and mysterious names including w
ords like Nazarene, Glory, Eternal, Assembly, Salvation and Tabernacle, sometimes several of these in the same name. I used to slow down as I passed them so I could catch some of the singing, so much more spirited than ours. And sometimes, if no one was around, I would pause and listen for a moment to a fast-talking, gasping, repetitious preacher in the throes of being penetrated by the Holy Ghost (enthusiastic in its etymological sense) and the shouted responses of the congregation that asked the brother (rather than ‘father’) to lay the Word of God upon them! For a long time, the only Protestants I knew were Negroes, and it seemed that being a Protestant was a more lively and interesting affair than being a Catholic. That was before I met White Protestants and learned that this is not the case. But at least most Protestants eventually get over their relatively rigid and sanitized childhoods, while Jews and Catholics struggle with their uncertainties and guilt for the rest of their lives and, what is worse, feel obliged to tell everybody about it.

  The blocks east of us, down the hill between North Pearl Street and the Hudson River, were entirely Negro. Most people called them niggers or spades or blacks or coons or smokes or jigs, not in anger or contempt, but simply because that was their street appellation, just as we were polacks or wops or micks or canuks. When people did say ‘Negro’, you could often hear ironic quotation marks in the long e in the North. In the South the e was a short i, and the o reduced to a schwa, so that it came out ‘niggre’, only a breath away from nigger. My mother never let my sister or me use any other word than Negro, perhaps because she was sensitive to the racial slurs she had faced as a quarter-breed child in a very Yankee village.16