The Crazyladies of Pearl Street Page 14

  My grandfather’s reaction to Maud’s death did permanent damage to my mother’s already fragile self-esteem. He asked his two unmarried sisters to take his ‘middle girl’ to live with them in Plattsburg, up on the Canadian border. He assured my mother that he would bring her back home as soon as he had ‘worked things out’. She was the only child to leave the home; her older brother had quit school at sixteen and was contributing part of his earnings to the family; her younger brother was little more than a baby and had to be cared for by her older sister, the homemaker; and her younger sister’s cute antics brought some sunlight into her father’s life. My mother felt the pain of separation intensely, particularly as her maiden aunts had very little English, and she was expected to speak to them in French, of which she had only a smattering because her Yankee mother had insisted that theirs would be an English-speaking house because she knew that the only access to the unique American experience is through the English language. (A fact that fans of multi-cultural education still choose to ignore.)

  My mother rebelled, refusing not only to speak French, but to understand the rules by which her aunts ordered their narrow, pious lives. She did, however, send monthly letters in French to her father, writing with a careful, blot-free hand. I have one of them on my desk at this moment, and the French is not only grammatically correct, but even elegant in the formulaic way of French epistles. I suspect that she copied letters written for her by her aunts. When she finally returned to her family a year later, everything in the running of the house and the daily routine had changed in her absence, duties and roles had been assigned, all the niches filled. An outsider in her own home, she sought recognition and significance by emulating her father, hoping to earn his approval. He pitched for the town baseball team and had its highest batting average throughout those years when Fort Anne was the terror of such centers of baseball excellence as Comstock, Truthville and Whitehall; so my mother became a tomboy and played short-stop for the youth club, the only girl on the team.

  Over the years, Calvinist-Republican-Anglo-Saxon Fort Anne came to accept Catholic-Democrat-half-breed Edmond LaPointe, the man who knew more about them than their minister or their doctor because his position as station master meant that he knew of their every voyage, their every shipment of goods, their mail, their telegrams, and those great events of marriage, birth and death that gathered their extended families from up and down the railroad network, and he was never known to gossip or to break a confidence. In the view of the townsfolk, his life-long mourning for Maud mitigated, to a certain extent, his audacity in having married her in the first place. He was the outsider who overcame what they viewed as disadvantages of race, religion and culture, but who had, through hard work, earned the right to be considered a part of their village. It became idiomatic to speak of Ed LaPointe as a ‘real success story’.

  All her life, my mother yearned to be a success, too, and thereby earn her father’s admiration and respect.

  ...Admiration and respect? Look at me! Ruby Lucile LaPointe, living on public charity! My mother would rage against the series of blows that had brought her low, until we knew the litany of misfortune by heart. First her husband deserted her, then the Depression swept over the country, drying up jobs, then her father died and she lost her last source of emotional and financial support, then her fragile lungs made it impossible for her to keep a steady job. The fact that she viewed even the Great Depression as a personal affront reveals the sense of grievance she nurtured all her life.

  But she wasn’t ready to give up. No, sir! She tightened her jaw against Fate and clung doggedly to her certitude that one of these days our ship would come in, and when it did, we’d be ready to board it, ‘...come hell and high water!’

  Boo-Hoo...Two Sleepy People...Jeepers Creepers

  (where’d you get those peepers)...I Double Dare You...

  You Go to My Head...Thanks for the Memory...

  Her substitution of ‘hell and high water’ for ‘hell or high water’, the ‘or’ evoking Revelation’s alternative eschatological cataclysms of Fire or Flood, led me into an error that persisted for years. I always envisioned an interfering she-devil named Helen Highwater who vented her wrath on people who were just trying to get along.

  Another of Mother’s life-long misapprehensions was her belief that the ‘hoi polloi’ were ritzy, snobbish folk. When she said the words she would push the tip of her nose up with her finger to illustrate the snootiness of these hoi polloi. I suspect this error was based on the similarity between ‘hoi polloi’ and ‘hoity-toity’. In fact, the two derogations often appeared side by side in a rosary of epithets accusing someone of a real or imagined snub, as in ‘...and if that snooty, hoity-toity, hoi polloi bastard thinks that he...!’ As is often the case with self-taught children who develop their vocabularies in cultural isolation, I later experienced the stinging embarrassment of misusing ‘hoi polloi’ and ‘Helen Highwater’ in public. Similarly, my Terpsichore had only three syllables, and my Penelope’s last five letters were pronounced ‘elope’, as in ‘to run away to marry’. My mortification when corrected on these occasions was all the hotter (and all the more deserved) because I had been parading my learning. It would be some time before I learned that ‘the hoi polloi’ was a tautology, and longer yet before I understood that to drop the ‘the’ was worse than tautological, it was pedantic.

  Mother got idioms and adages wrong through mishearing or carelessness, but she also shared with most Americans the conviction that a person doesn’t really have to be all that precise in speech (indeed, that there is something nitpicking and snooty in being so). So long as you’re truly sincere about what you are saying, you can just throw sounds in the general direction of your notions, and your interlocutor will get the idea. But for all her liberal attitudes towards usage, one of her solecisms derived from an effort to avoid slack diction. When describing people who thought too highly of themselves (those ritzy hoi polloi bastards who stiffed her when she was working as a waitress, for example) she would accuse them of being ‘highfaluting’, the terminal ‘g’ scrupulously pronounced, as though it derived from the verb ‘to falute’, meaning something akin to ‘to flaunt’, and those who faluted broadly could be said to high-falute.

  By the end of our second summer on North Pearl, my interest in unusual words and my eagerness to inflict them on others had earned me a place as one of the block’s ‘characters’, those kids who possessed some special trait or ability. Some kids stood out because they were tough, some were envied because they were sickly and got to stay away from school a lot, some could run fast, one was famous for being amazingly dirty, another could almost rupture your ears with his piercing screams, one was called ‘wormy’, not because he had worms, but because he could eat them, to every onlooker’s fascinated disgust, and I was known as the ‘professor’...the smart one. This might have been a dangerous role to play because teachers tended to favor smart kids, but luckily I was also a clown and a wiseass, and that made my smartness less objectionable to my classmates. My wiseassery never made them envious of me because the ability to make subtle fun of a teacher was not considered nearly so desirable a social attribute as the ability to burp or fart loudly during a quiz, or a prayer.

  Love Walked Right In...You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby...Music, Maestro, Please...

  I’ve Got a Pocket Full of Dreams...

  My dominant memory of our summers is the crushing heat. Unlike the lakeside village of my early childhood with its breezy summer days and cool nights, there was no relief from the oppressive heat waves of 1936 and 1938, two of the hottest ever recorded in Albany. Children suffered rashes and heat prostration, and some old people died of breathing problems. No one had electric fans, and air-conditioning was a thing of the future, except in a few movie houses, where it was concentrated in the lobby, so you could feel its effect upon entering and be attracted back out to the cool lobby during intermissions to buy candy or
popcorn. The city’s cement and brick absorbed heat all through the day and radiated it out into the street after dark, so the nights were as hot as the days. People who lived on upper floors where the heat was the worst allowed their kids to sleep out on fire escapes in nests of sweat-sodden pillows and sofa cushions, while the parents sat out on their stoops late into the night, fanning themselves with pieces of cardboard, and complaining sleepily about the heat. Every third or fourth day, a fireman would come and screw a spray nozzle onto a fire hydrant, then he’d open it with a big two-handed wrench so that little kids in their underwear could dash through the spray while bigger kids in sodden dresses or knickers struggled against the weight of the gush, striving to approach the hydrant, defying the pounding force of the water on their chests, then laughing helplessly as they were driven back, their feet slipping over the smooth, wet cobblestones. Even grown-up women would stand on the edges of the spray, smiling as they caught handfuls of cool iridescent mist in their palms and rubbed it over their arms and necks, receiving it like a blessing from God. Adolescent boys would yearn to strip down and rush in but, fearful of compromising their newly acquired reputations for being tough and cool, they were obliged to lean against the buildings with their hands in their pockets and look on, sneering. And sweating.

  One scorching day when Anne-Marie and I were playing in the fire hydrant spray I looked up to see my mother dressed in the boyishly cut bathing suit of her flapper days, laughing as she fought her way towards the hydrant against the pounding force of the water, the only adult among the kids. It was like her to surrender to a caprice and come play with us, and I was proud of her youth and vivacity, but I was intensely aware of the brittle stares of other mothers sitting on their stoops, women who could never have squeezed into the swimsuits they had worn as teenagers, and who thought that those who revealed their bodies by doing so were little better than hussies. Swimsuits of my mother’s era were made of thick wool knit so the water would drain quickly out, leaving the suit dry enough to provide some protection against cold Atlantic winds. When, breathless with laughter and the cold water, she stepped out of the stream and stood on the curb to watch Anne-Marie and me play, the water immediately drained out of her suit in a steady stream that fell from between her legs onto the cement, and one of the adolescent boys noticed this and nudged a friend to point it out. Look at her. Pissing on the sidewalk. I slipped away and went back into the house, the fun and relief of the fire hydrant spray ruined.

  The ‘difference’ for which the neighbor ladies never forgave my mother expressed itself not only in a sense of dress that was lodged in her ‘heyday’, the ’Twenties, with the bell-bottom slacks and the close-fitting sweaters that revealed the existence of breasts, two distinct breasts with nipples, not the undefined shelf of wobbly flesh that other mothers had at their chests. There was also her boyish, rather choppy haircut that she did for herself in front of the bathroom mirror holding kitchen scissors in one hand and the wet strand of hair in the other. And the way she was always polite to crazy Mrs Meehan, whom other women ignored broadly whenever they passed the cluster of houses that sheltered that incestuous clan. “It takes one to know one,” the women would mutter under their breath when they saw Mrs Meehan running up to Mother to say hello. But the most unforgivably ‘different’ thing she did was to come out onto the street and play with my sister and me, just as though she were a kid. Kick-the-can, or Simon-says, or tag with a lamp post as ‘home’. She would jump rope with Anne-Marie, or play the French-Canadian version of Ring-Around-the-Roses: Rond, rond, macaron. Ta p’tite soeur est la maison. Fais cei, fais cela, ah...ah...achoo!

  The block responded to Mother’s difference by deciding that she was crazy. Not dangerous, and not as crazy as some, but a crazylady nonetheless. And that made me the son of a crazylady. As if I didn’t have a sufficient burden of difference to bear on my own account.

  But it was true that Mother was never quite in step with everyday realities. Everything that happened to her was heavily colored, either with portent or with promise. Her alternate moods of black depression and soaring elation converted minor setbacks into catastrophic disasters and occasional bits of good luck into spreading vistas of eternal promise, so she reeled from feeling crushed by the weight of her troubles to being treacherously deceived by false omens of good fortune.

  She had been born with a zest for life, the resilience to overcome the rough moments, and the appetite to relish the pleasant ones. But a series of confidence-eroding events left her defensive, baffled, wounded and ready to wound in return.

  The feelings my sister and I had for our mother were an uneasy blend of love, gratitude and apprehension. Our love was the unquestioned love of a child for his parent, the simple and comforting foundation for our daily lives. Our gratitude was for the way she unfailingly encouraged us and nourished our slightest glimmer of talent or gift, although we were sometimes uncomfortable with the expectations that accompanied that encouragement. Our apprehension had to do with her hair-trigger temper that lashed out at the least slight to her dignity. Those whose ethnic roots are grounds for popular derision become understandably touchy, and in bellicose compensation, they flaunt those ridiculed roots (as in: I’m a Martian and proud of it!). My mother boasted about being French and Indian. She viewed the first as the source of her innate good taste, and the second as making her dangerous to cross. Her French blood was really only rustic habitant Canadian, probably not racially French at all in origin, but either Nordic-Norman or Gaelic-Breton, like most of the early immigrants to Canada; but the war-like Indian was genuine enough.

  This Can’t Be Love...A-Tisket A-Tasket...

  Falling in Love with Love...My Prayer...

  I Can Dream, Can’t I...

  I first read about our Onondaga tribe one rainy autumn afternoon when I was cozily ensconced in a secret nest I had found in the architectural hodgepodge of the library at the corner of North Pearl and Clinton Avenue. Soon after our arrival in Albany my mother got library cards for the three of us, but I didn’t find this library useful or attractive because I was issued a child’s card that restricted me to a basement Children’s Library that had cheery messages cut out of colored paper and pinned on the walls, and a corner for toddlers with little chairs and plenty of picture books for them to rip up and eat. For older kids, there were story books with salubrious moral parables, collections of things to do around the house on rainy days, and so-called Youth Books obviously written by middle-aged people who had had children described to them in considerable detail, but had never actually met one. I quickly used up the few good books, like Howard Pyle’s splendid illustrated adventures, and I had just about given up on finding anything else of interest when, one long, rainy afternoon in autumn, I noticed a cast-iron spiral staircase in the corner most distant from the librarian’s desk, and hidden from her by a ceiling-to-floor bookcase that blocked off access to the stairs. While the librarian sat at a table coloring in the letters of yet another poster, her mind focused on not running over the edge of the lines, I squeezed in behind the bookcase and noiselessly climbed the spiral stairs, inching up into a dusty, enticing darkness, until my outstretched hand discovered a door which I was sure must be locked, so I turned to go back down. But the devil told me to try the handle. It wasn’t locked. I eased it open a crack and peeked out to find myself in a dark corner of a Victorian-Gothic room with oaken paneling and tall, narrow windows with stained glass depicting events in the history of Albany. It was the home of the De Witt Clinton Memorial Collection, bulging with bound manuscripts, diaries, records, personal memoranda; all rare, all arid, few read. For me, there was a rich rift of old books about the Indians of our state. Other than occasional staff meetings, the only use made of this room was to store trolleys of returned books that were left there until a librarian had time to re-shelve them. A book on one of these trolleys was in a kind of limbo: it had been checked in, but not yet put back into circulation, so it had dropped
out of the library’s retrieval system, and I could take such a book and keep it for weeks, eventually returning it to one of the trolleys when I was through with it. For three years I used the De Witt Clinton Room as a cozy hide-out. After selecting one of my personal books from where I stashed them behind a row of over-sized volumes on a lower shelf, I would scramble up into the deep niche of a Gothic stained-glass window where I was warmed by rising currents of air from an ornate radiator at my feet, and its ancient plumbing would alternate deep intestinal gurglings with long soulful sighs as I read by light diffused through colored glass. My most comforting memories of the years in Albany are the hours I spent reading in that hidden nest, dark and cool in summer, cozily warm in winter, but best when hard raindrops rattled on the stained glass behind me, and color rippled over the page of my book, while I lost myself in the story, safe, dry and warmed by my sighing, gurgling radiator.

  I was installed in my reading niche one afternoon, playing hooky, as I often did after Miss Cox’s death, when I first read about the Onondagas (‘keepers-of-the-middle-lodge’), my grandfather’s tribe, and therefore mine. I learned that from its central position within the five-nation Iroquois Federation the Onondagas acted as arbitrators in times of political discord. As befitted the tribe of Hiawatha, the Onondagas were also the Federation’s story-tellers and weavers of myth. So, it was in my blood to be a story-teller and a weaver of myths! How about that? No wonder I lived such an intense secret life of story games in which I was pitted against Redcoats, Saracens, Cattle Ruslers and Cardinal Richelieu’s men, or, a couple of years later, the sneering Nazis and leering Japanese. This early belief that I was a born tale-weaver sustained me in my eventual life’s work, telling stories like this one. There is a parallel between my becoming a writer and how men of another Iroquoian tribe, the Mohawks, became the builders of America’s skyscrapers, able to work on naked steel girders at great heights without a trace of vertigo. Despite their cocky confidence and firmly held beliefs, there is no genetic basis for the ‘natural balance’ they claim to be born with, but their confidence gives them the ability to work high iron in wind and rain, protected from those lethal panic attacks that make the palms of lesser men sweat and their knees tremble. Mohawks have no vertigo because they believe they have no vertigo, just as I dare to face a pile of blank paper every day because I believe that I share the Onondagan aptitude for story-telling. This is one of those things that are dangerous to think about too long because if confidence sires ability out of daring, then what happens if a little crack appears in that confidence and doubt begins to seep through and spread and widen until you lose the belief that you can...whoa, there! Leave it alone. Don’t pick at thoughts like that. They infect.