The Crazyladies of Pearl Street Page 13

  This Can’t Be Love...My Heart Belongs to Daddy...

  Louise...You Go to My Head...

  I Get Along Without You Very Well...

  Sometimes I was able to get Mother to retell the stories of how her father had begun life as a half-breed laborer, but had worked and studied to improve himself and eventually surmounted barriers of culture, race and religion to win the hand of my grandmother. I knew these stories by heart, but I loved hearing about my grandfather whom I hero-worshipped and tried to emulate—indeed, still do. The images I retain of Edmond LaPointe come mostly from my mother’s stories, because he died when I was five, so I have only fragmentary sensory memories of his visits to us at Lake George Village every Sunday: the smell of leather polish and of the Johnson’s baby powder he used to cover his raspy cheeks. Half-blood though he was, he had not inherited the Indian male’s advantage of having little beard. His cheeks were usually blue with stubble because it was his habit to shave just before going to bed. Mother explained to me that businessmen shave in the morning, because they love their jobs, but men like Edmond LaPointe shave at night, because they love their wives. It would be some years before I understood this.

  My grandfather used to arrive at our cottage in Lake George Village bearing ‘safety lollipops’, which had flexible loop-sticks designed to protect the child who ran with a lollipop in his mouth from falling flat on his face and driving the stick through the back of his neck...an ever-present danger, according to the prevailing folk wisdom of the era. A packet of the loop-stick safety lollipops contained five different flavors (five colors, really, as the flavors were only slight variants of ‘sweet’), and we had to choose one, first Anne-Marie, then I. The moment of choice was difficult. It wasn’t so much deciding which one I wanted, but which three I was willing to leave behind.

  The LaPointes came from a small mixed-blood farming community in Quebec, where their ancestors had lived since they had been driven out of their homeland in the Finger Lakes near the end of the eighteenth century. Their tribe, the Onondaga, had fought on the side of the French and against the English in the French-and-Indian Wars because the French fur traders had no intention of settling in Onondagan territory, while the land hunger of the English colonists was insatiable. But the English colonists won, and several decimated Onondaga clans made their way up into Canada and settled on thin, rocky farmland near the juncture of the Ste. Anne and St. Lawrence rivers, where they found themselves surrounded by Algonquin-speaking tribes, their traditional enemies. (Well, not so much their enemies as their livestock, as the Iroquois economy included a regular harvest of the possessions, furs, and women of the Algonquin tribes within their catchment.) So it is understandable that this band of displaced Onondagas was unloved by their new Algonquin-speaking neighbors.

  Because the stranded Iroquois remnant consisted almost entirely of women, children and old men, their warriors having fallen in battle, the community quickly became mixed with local French blood. Thus, the part-breed character of later generations did not result from intermarriage between a lovely Indian princess and a brave White woodsman, as the romantic traditions of so many mtis families assert, because Victorian sensibilities could not abide the thought of an Indian male astride a White woman; the people of my grandfather’s generation were breeds descended from breed parents, who had descended from breed great-grandparents, and so on. They had little contact with either the Whites or the Algonquins of the Three Rivers country, and after the last of the Onondaga returned at the end of the nineteenth century to that part of their homeland that had become the United States, the Algonquins remaining behind got a belated revenge by writing these Iroquois interlopers out of the folk history that they packaged for White tourists.

  Over-farmed and badly farmed,17 the LaPointe land was too fatigued to support the clan through the agricultural depressions of the 1860s and ’70s, so, together with most of the displaced Onondaga mixed-bloods, they gave up and drifted south, settling in French-speaking communities that provided unskilled labor for mills and factories throughout northern New York and New England. My grandfather, Edmond LaPointe, began working for the New York Central Railroad at the age of fifteen, gandy-dancing with a line crew in the draining heat of summer and the drifting snows of winter. But he was bright enough to see that life was better for those who toiled indoors and wore ties, so he worked on his English and taught himself Morse code and ultimately became a railroad telegrapher. Step by step, he worked his way up until, at the age of twenty-five, he was appointed station master in the town of Fort Anne, New York. If you picture the all-powerful station master of a major railroad terminal presiding over a staff of several hundred clerks, ticket agents, baggage men, book-keepers, yard bosses, freight handlers, cleaners, maintenance crew and signal men, you will not have a very accurate image of Ed LaPointe’s work and life, for in little whistle-stops like Fort Anne at the turn of the century, the station master was the clerk, telegrapher, baggage man, freight handler, cleaner, yard boss, signal man and maintenance crew. These versatile one-man-bands were so valuable to the New York Central Line that they were seldom considered for advancement into mainstream administration; instead, they were moved from one tank-town to another, lucky if they ended up having one trainee-assistant by the time they reached retirement age, after which they usually spent three or four years as a semi-retired ‘floater’: an experienced man who could replace any station master in the system in case of illness, death or, very rarely, a vacation. But it was indoor work, and the station master was an important man in his village, not only at the center of its transportation but of its communications too, as he was also the Western Union telegrapher. A station master got news from the outer world first, so his views were listened to around the pot-bellied stove of the general store. He wore a suit and tie and was called Mister—a big step from being an anonymous French-speaking, half-breed gandy-dancer.

  Although the station master was at the center of his community (in addition to being the entire staff of the station, Edmond LaPointe used his access to transportation to establish an independent enterprise in coal and ice), he was viewed as an oddity and an outsider by the stiff Yankee village of Fort Anne, not far from the Vermont border. Not only was he French, but he was half Indian—a savage, not to put too fine a point on it. Worse yet, he was a Catholic. And if all that wasn’t enough, he was also a Democrat, which in those ultra-conservative rural up-state villages was akin to being a bomb-throwing anarchist. But any harassment or overt hostility he might have met because of his race, religion or political orientation was mitigated by the general knowledge that Ed LaPointe was an avid amateur boxer who was not only quick with his fists, but who took a delight in fighting. (A savage delight, some added archly.) He had a powerful grip and bony fists he could throw at your face like rocks, and it was his practice to go to Fistcity while the other fellow was still strutting and blustering, a tactic I imitated.

  The village of Fort Anne was dismayed to learn that this Catholic, Democrat, half-breed scrapper had successfully wooed Maud Prescott, the daughter of a Puritan family that lived on the Vermont farm their ancestors had worked since before the Revolution (indeed, before there had been a Vermont). The Prescotts had come to the New World in the 1640s and they could (and often did) boast that the four men of their name who died fighting in the Revolution were fifth-generation Americans. Maud was the eleventh generation of Prescotts in America, which makes me the thirteenth and my grandchildren the fifteenth; this in a country where few people can claim more than four or five generations of American-born ancestors, and most of those who can are Black.

  To tease his wife, Ed LaPointe used to tell his children: “Your mother’s family is proud of having come to the New World on the Mayflower, but when they arrived my family was standing on the shore, waiting for them.” This wasn’t exactly true because the Prescotts didn’t come to New England until 1642, and the eastward migration of the Iroquois had only reached the Hudson
River when they collided with the westward migration of the Whites. I later discovered that my grandfather’s line about the White side of the family arriving on the Mayflower and the Indian side greeting them on the shore has been ascribed to Will Rogers; and that made sense because the wry, folksy Will Rogers, also a half-blood, was both Edmond LaPointe’s favorite newspaper columnist and his favorite actor.

  At the age of eighteen, the high-spirited Maud Prescott must have been very much in love to have married Edmond LaPointe against the wishes of her family, which not only refused to attend their wedding but had nothing further to do with either her or her children. The women of Fort Anne endorsed the Prescott family’s behavior because, as they told one another in those tense whispers that adults naively believe are inaudible to children, there could only be one reason why a girl from a good family would marry a Catholic half-breed, and we all know what that is. The fact that Maud and Edmond’s first child came, stillborn, a full year after their marriage did not stanch rumors of Maud’s having married out of necessity. Fact and evidence being but feeble defenses against prejudice, the village women were able to say: “Well, all right, so maybe she wasn’t ‘that way’ when they got married; maybe she just thought she was. But she wouldn’t have thought so if the two of them hadn’t been...well, you see what I mean.”

  Saturday was market day in Fort Anne, and it occasioned one of those splendidly eccentric New England traditions that made Yankee communities unique before the homogenizing effects of electronic mass communications. It was the custom for village women to hold open house between three in the afternoon and the fall of evening, when the wagons and buggies had to start back towards the farms. The signal that a house was ‘receiving’ was a lit oil lamp in the front window. Half the village women offered hospitality one week, half the next, and those whose turn it was to serve cookies and tea received those whose turn it was not, along with any passing farm people who might be glad for a chance to tie their wagons to the rail and rest their feet and bottoms for a while, letting their kids run the streets with the town brats while they sat in stuffy parlors whose only other functions were receiving preachers and laying out the dead. While sipping their tea and nibbling cookies, they would exchange succulent bits of gossip, grim prognostications about declining farm prices and public morals, and mutual assurances that the younger generation was far too pampered to ever develop into strong, useful, self-reliant citizens like—well, like themselves, though they shouldn’t say it.

  The first Saturday after Maud and Edmond returned from their two-day honeymoon in Montreal (Ed could not find a ‘floater’ to replace him for longer), Maud worked all morning baking the fancy cookies that were her only domestic glory, because before meeting Ed she had been determined never to marry, but instead to teach in some big city like New York or Albany and devote herself to the crusade for Woman Suffrage. A dozen brand-new cups and saucers and a tea pot were set up on the table, and a kettle was purring on the back of the coal stove when, at three o’clock, she lit an oil lamp in the window of their small house. She would have to receive the guests and well-wishers herself, because Ed could never leave the station until the northbound 7:53 had passed through.

  When my grandfather got home a little after eight, he found Maud sitting in the gloom, the room lit only by the greeting lamp in the window. Not one cup of tea had been poured, not a cookie eaten, not a word of gossip exchanged. The ‘fallen woman’ had been ostracized by buggy after buggy that passed by, its occupants looking stiffly ahead. Maud was in tears. Tears of rage as much as tears of humiliation.

  At a quarter after six the following Monday morning, my grandfather entered Henry & Francis Driscoll’s General Store (‘Hank ’n’ Frank’s Place’) where the village men gathered around the pot-bellied stove in a start-of-the-week ritual. With Ed LaPointe’s entrance, the conversation stumbled and dried up as men glanced at one another uneasily, but he greeted the gathering breezily and asked ‘Mule’ Milner, the village strong man who did odd jobs, how he was feeling that morning. Assuming that Ed LaPointe had a chore for him down at the station, Mule rose from his chair close to the stove and said he was feeling fit as a fid—Ed hit him so hard that his nose splatted, and Mule sprawled back into the laps of three townsmen.

  “Don’t get up, Mule,” Ed warned. “I’ll just have to put you down again.”

  Mule blinked, stunned and baffled. But he had the good sense not to stand up.

  “Sorry I had to hit you,” my grandfather said, passing him his handkerchief. “But you’re the strongest man in town, and what I’m doing here is making a point. All right, you can get up now. Go over and have Doc Burns fix your nose, and put it on my bill. Come on, give me your hand. Up you come.” After Mule had staggered down the front steps of the general store, Ed turned to the assembly. “Last Saturday my wife spent all morning baking cookies. And how many people came calling? Not one. Not a single one of you. Can you imagine how that hurt her feelings? Well, that’s not going to happen again. Here’s how things are going to be, gentlemen...” He told them that next Saturday there would be a lamp lit in their window, and his wife would be serving tea and cookies, and he expected every man in that store—and their wives!—to drop in for a cup of tea, a cookie or two, and a little pleasant conversation. He admitted that he couldn’t make them do anything they didn’t want to do. They were free citizens of a free country, and it was entirely up to them if they came calling or not. But Ed would drop in to the general store the following Monday morning, and if anyone there had not shown up in Maud’s parlor—with his wife!—another man would have to bring his nose over to Doc Burns to get it fixed.

  “Now, we all know that if you decide to take me on three or four against one, you’re pretty sure to win. But it’s a funny thing about those damned Indians. They just don’t know when to quit. Sooner or later I’ll meet you when you’re on your own and you will get busted. You can believe that like you believe the sun will rise tomorrow. Well, gentlemen...” He took out his pocket watch. “...I’ve got to meet the 6:25. See you next Monday.” And he left.

  The following Saturday, Maud ran out of cookies and she had to refill the kettle several times. Most of her women visitors were tight-lipped and crisp-voiced, but the men praised her cookies volubly and begged her to give their wives her recipe.

  In time, Maud earned the friendship and admiration of those younger village women who shared her sense of outrage that women were denied the right to vote and joined in her efforts to remedy that injustice. She and Ed had five live children before she died in 1918, a victim of the Spanish ’Flu that killed more people than the First World War. Ed LaPointe never remarried, and his grief never healed. He brought up his two sons and three daughters himself, and later he drained his modest savings to help them through the early years of the Great Depression, until he died in an automobile accident at the age of fifty-one. From time to time, chances for getting posted to better-paying stations came along, but he turned them down because he didn’t want to leave Fort Anne, where his wife was buried and where, every Saturday evening from her death until his, he spent an hour sitting at her graveside, silently telling her how the kids were getting along, and what was happening in the village, and how much he missed her.

  One bit of good news he was able to share with her was that women had finally won the vote.

  This iconographic image of my grandfather sitting in the gathering evening beside the grave of his Maud took on a radiant significance within the families of his five children, symbolizing the tenderness of romantic marriage and the depth and durability of a great love. But as a man who has lived twenty years longer than my grandfather did, I discern something self-indulgent and damaging in his disproportionate grief at a time when his children needed all the attention and love he could give. A stronger, wiser or more sensitive man would have concealed most of his grief to prevent his children from feeling that he had loved Maud more than he could ever love any of th
em, which, in the self-immolating way of children, they would assume had something to do with their inadequacies, not their father’s. The most affected by his selfish bereavement were my mother and his oldest daughter, Odette. He took Odette out of school at the age of fourteen to become the family’s homemaker responsible not only for the cooking and cleaning, but for organizing her siblings’ household chores. This removed her from the one-of-the-gang camaraderie of the children and put her into a no-woman’s-land of responsibility without moral authority. Trapped by the praise of the entire town for her dutiful self-sacrifice, Odette continued to keep house for her father until she was nearly thirty, when she rebelled and left to enter the stream of life, thereafter maintaining only the flimsiest contact with the others, whom she identified with her lost youth. As though to rebuke my grandfather for taking her out of school where she had been a highly praised student, Odette worked hard to make up her lost education and eventually entered a normal college to train as a teacher. It was there that she met a man and married, starting her life as an adult woman at the age of thirty-three.

  My mother’s childhood was less obviously but more profoundly scarred by her mother’s death. From the first, she had lacked the self-assurance that comes with having an established role within a family. As we know, the eldest child of each sex enjoys those character-building responsibilities and those first-through-the-gauntlet privileges that breed confidence and self-knowledge, just as the youngest benefits from greater freedom and the cosseting that engenders a sense of ‘specialness’. But my mother was the third child in a family of five in which the eldest and youngest were boys, so she was the middle girl of a middle group of girls. Her elder sister was the responsible one; her younger sister was the cherished one; my mother was...the other one.