The Crazyladies of Pearl Street Page 15

  Whistle While You Work...Heart and Soul...

  While a Cigarette Was Burning...

  Flat Foot Floogie...Alexander’s Ragtime Band...

  I heard people talk about Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and we occasionally saw them in movie newsreels, but I never got the impression that anyone felt menaced by these comic figures, the one a strutting, pouting clown, the other a ranting, mechanical doll version of Charlie Chaplin. Then, in March of 1938, German soldiers marched into Austria, and within a few days that country was absorbed into the Third Reich. Newsreels showed Hitler arriving to declare Austria a province of the Reich, while Austrian children cheered and waved little flags with what looked like genuflecting crosses on them. Then we heard no more about Austria. Other events filled the news.

  Mr Kane, who had relatives in Austria, was listening to short-wave broadcasts from Vienna the day the Germans marched in. He was not at all complacent about these events. He tried to explain them to me one evening on his side steps, mentioning people whose odd-sounding German names immediately slipped out of my memory (probably von Papen, Seyss-Inquart and Schuschnigg) and calling what had happened ‘the anschluss’, which I did remember because he repeated it several times and it had a strangely slippery sound. Seeing my confusion, he went into his living quarters behind the store, and came back with an atlas, which he opened to a page that showed central Europe. With his finger, he traced the eastern border of the new ‘greater Germany’ that included Austria, and he pointed out that it looked like the gaping jaws of a wolf. Then he tapped the western end of Czechoslovakia. “How would you like to be living between those jaws at this moment?” he asked. “There...in the Sudetenland.”

  Stairway to the Stars...Sunrise Serenade...Little Sir Echo...

  My Prayer...Beer Barrel Polka...

  Oh, Johnny, Oh, Johnny, Oh!...Three Little Fishies...

  One manifestation of my mother’s famous French-’n’-Indian pride was her refusal to accept that, poor though we were, her kids couldn’t have what she called a ‘decent Christmas’, which meant receiving presents that were much too expensive for our budget, bought with money she earned working night shifts at restaurants through the Christmas season. She never seemed to be aware of how frightened my sister and I were that our family would be broken up by social workers who believed her ill health made her an unfit mother, all because she was stubbornly determined to give us presents as nice as other kids got...come Helen Highwater. I associate these ‘decent Christmases’ with my mother lying on the living room couch, coughing and fevered, while my sister and I opened presents, all the while dreading that she would end up in a hospital again, and we would be obliged to conceal the fact that she wasn’t home from those social work people whose primary mission in life seemed to be to send us to some institution. Only once did they catch us and send us to an orphans’ home. But that once was enough.

  Our Christmas tree was always decorated in blue and silver because my mother considered garish splashes of color beneath the refined tastes she had inherited with her French blood (though what modifying effect her wild Iroquois roots might have had on that aesthetic reserve was never discussed). On the first Christmas after my birth, Mother cut snowflake shapes out of cardboard and pasted metallic blue wrapping paper on one side and tin foil on the other, creating the silver-and-blue motif that we would follow forever after. We added to these from year to year and put them, with the silver foil icicles we laboriously plucked off the tree before we threw it out, into a flat box at the top of our closet until the next Christmas. Throughout my childhood the blue-and-silver tree served as a symbol and proof of highly refined taste. My mother identified several other such peaks of excellence within creation: like the Northern Spy apple. She once pointed out some shiny examples of these superior fruit in the Washington Street Market where they were displayed in a perfect pyramid of sleeve-buffed globes. Another pinnacle of perfection was the delicate, golden, pink-hearted Talisman rose she showed me in a florist’s showcase. Both of these she affirmed to be the finest examples of their species...all that a rose or an apple could ever hope to be...which was why we couldn’t afford them. In the gustatory category, the most perfect things were understood to be T-bone steaks and the seedless centers of watermelon, to which I secretly added a delight I had experienced only once, in a movie house where I had splurged in madcap indulgence and bought a box of chewy licorice candy within a crunchy carapace. I promised myself that when our ship came in, my mother’s days would be littered with blue-and-silver Christmas trees, Talisman roses, Northern Spy apples, T-bone steaks, seedless hearts of watermelon, and boxes of Good & Plenty...in short, all the really excellent things this life has to offer.

  Most of our Christmas presents were clothing of the functional sort, but Mother always made sure that each of us got something splendid and totally unexpected—except, of course, that kids quickly learn the rules to life’s game, so my sister and I always expected something unexpected, though we weren’t so foolish as to actually hope for it, because we knew that there was nothing more likely to drive good luck away than hoping for it. But we never knew which unexpected thing to expect. One Christmas—the one that led to our spending two months in a grim Catholic orphanage while Mother teetered on the edge of life in a sanitarium—I got a toy microscope that let me see the ghastly things that inhabit mud puddles. I did well in science and math, so my mother decided that the surest way for me to bring our ship into port was by becoming a doctor. That Christmas my sister got a much-desired pouty-lipped doll with ‘magic skin’, whatever the hell that was.

  Of course these gifts were reckless extravagances for a family that was never more than a couple of dollars and a few days away from hunger, but that’s how poor people cope with being marooned in poverty while all around them flows the frothy stream of the consumer culture. When I hear middle-class people complain about the poor buying luxuries for their kids when they don’t even have enough for groceries, I remember the lavish Christmases my mother gave us, even at the risk of breaking up the family. Prudence is a bourgeois virtue, because the rich have something worth saving. The poor splurge because they need desperately to make a colorful splash across the drab fabric of their lives. The hungry don’t dream of brown rice and vegetables; they dream of cake.

  Over the Rainbow...Deep Purple...South of the Border...

  All the Things You Are...And the Angels Sing...

  Indian Summer...Wishing (will make it so)...

  Hunching over his short-wave radio late into the night, browsing the crackling ether in search of amateur broadcasters from Czechoslovakia and Poland to keep himself informed of the storm gathering over Europe, provided Mr Kane with escape from a wife who bullied him and derided him as a dreamer, a slacker and a luftmensch with no ambition. Actually, he had vast ambitions, but for mankind, not just for himself. His wife never tired of reminding him that she could have done better. A lot better. She’d had offers. Plenty! Before the Depression, Mr Kane had owned a small bookshop in New York City, where he spent more time discussing socialist ideas with like-minded droppers-in than he spent tending to business, so, lacking any savings to absorb the impact of the Wall Street collapse, he was quickly driven into bankruptcy. His wife’s family had responded to her relentless nagging by setting him up in a cheap cornerstore a good distance up-state, not out of affection for Mr Kane, whom they also considered an idler and a fool, but in order to get the formidable Mrs Kane off their backs. That was how the Kanes ended up on Pearl Street.

  If Mr Kane was a daydreaming socialist romantic, his wife was a born capitalist entrepreneur. When hectoring her husband to be harder on customers who were neglectful about paying off their slates failed to improve their finances, she gave up on him and launched herself into gainful ventures, first as a cosmetologist and later as a clairvoyant. Soon after arriving on North Pearl Street she converted their living room behind the shop into a Thursday afternoon ‘Be
auty Salon’ where she offered ‘professional permanents by a trained beautician’ to women of the neighborhood, whom she convinced that the newfangled home perms not only left one’s hair too tight and springy but were, she felt obliged to inform them ‘on the QT’, scientifically proven to cause premature hair loss. Mrs Kane’s ‘professional’ permanents were, in fact, amateur ones that she bought wholesale from a drugstore supplier, and her tonsorial training consisted of reading the instructions on the boxes. But no one could deny that she protected her clients from permanents that were unmanageably tight and springy, for Mrs Kane’s hairdos were always slack, floppy, and short-lived because she allowed them to set for only half the time suggested by the instructions, reasoning that it would be foolhardy business practice to intentionally increase the time between permanents by obeying the instructions slavishly.

  Her lack of training in the arcane intricacies of dying hair occasionally resulted in someone having to live with orange/pink hair for a month or so, but they continued to frequent her salon, largely because of the succulent gossip she retailed as a loss-leader. Most of this gossip was a product of Mrs Kane’s fertile imagination and was only partially believed by the women who absorbed the juicy, often slightly naughty, tales, their eyes wide with wonder and their lips pursed with offended propriety. When the Depression got so bad that even her manufactured gossip didn’t attract a sufficiently large clientele willing to risk bizarrely waved orange hair in return for being the first on the block to know of her neighbors’ misdeeds, misfortunes and flaws, Mrs Kane re-strung her mercantile bow: she announced that she had been the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, born with a caul over her face, and therefore she possessed the ability to penetrate the mists of time, although she was obliged to follow the ancient traditions of her murky craft and demand that her palm be crossed with silver before she revealed what she saw in the bottom of a tea cup (tea cost a nickel a cup in her Beauty Salon cum Gypsy Tea Room). It wasn’t that she was greedy. It was simply that if she broke the ancient tradition, she risked losing her rare gift. At first, the more cynical (and tightfisted) of Pearl Street’s gossips doubted Mrs Kane’s powers, but even they had to admit the amazing accuracy of the free character analysis that revealed her potential client’s probity, goodness of heart and philosophic acceptance of being undervalued, underloved, and not often enough listened to and obeyed. Then an event occurred that converted all the ladies into fervent believers in Mrs Kane’s Delphic gifts. While reading Mrs Donovan’s leaves, Mrs Kane suddenly shuddered, closed her eyes and insisted on returning Mrs Donovan’s quarter (the smallest coin that qualified as ‘silver’ when it came to crossing someone’s palm). When asked what she had seen that gave her such a turn, she refused to say another word because...well, she mustn’t say why. One month later to the minute (give or take a couple of days) Mrs Donovan’s uncle fell off the loading dock of the Burgermeister brewery and would almost surely have hurt himself seriously if he had been sober. When this news was reported in the Gypsy Tea Room and Beauty Salon, a thrill ran down the spines of the clients, and each expressed the pious hope that Mrs Kane would not suddenly break off during her reading and refuse to reveal the dark things to come, thus exposing her to everyone’s attention and sympathy.

  One day I was buying a can of tomatoes for my mother, and Mr Kane was displaying his skill at manipulating the long-handled can-grabber, but the can slipped from the metal grips and smashed the glass top of the candy case, and Mrs Kane came roaring out of her Tea Room in back and tore into him. Grow up for once, why don’t you! Always showing off! She wailed about how much that candy case had cost, even second hand! Where would they get the money for another one? Answer me that, why don’t you? Answer me that! She grabbed him by his narrow shoulders and shook him so hard that his teeth clicked. Then she disappeared sobbing back into her Beauty Salon, leaving him standing there, smiling in a slack embarrassed way. Seeing an adult humiliated like that mortified me so much that for a couple of weeks I walked three blocks to shop at a different cornerstore so as to avoid having to look Mr Kane in the face after having witnessed his humiliation.

  And to be honest there was another reason for not shopping at Mr Kane’s: I was sort of worried about glass splinters in the candy. Surely Mrs Kane would have tried to save the candy and sell it. Oh, they would have sifted the glass out as carefully as they could, but still...I could feel my throat close on a painful needle of glass.

  ...Mr Kane’s candy. Licorice Babies, a penny apiece, slick black on the outside, soft bituminous brown on the inside, and so sticky that there was a slight clicking sound when you pulled your teeth apart; Indian Corn, five-a-penny, orange at the base, white in the middle and red at the tip, no flavor other than a flowery sweetness, but kids were sure they could distinguish a hint of taste difference between the colors if the colors were carefully bitten off one by one and chewed on just the tips of your front teeth; Root Beer Barrels at two-a-penny were my personal favorites; the sugar-grit on the outside soon melted leaving them slick and hard and long-lasting, but dangerous to suck because deep holes with razor-sharp edges developed and they would lacerate your tongue if you were stupid enough to explore the hole with it...and you always were.

  But if I had three pennies, it wasn’t candy I bought at Mr Kane’s, deliciously treacherous though those Root Beer Barrels were. My favorite things were the three-penny ‘riffle books’, little flimsily bound books about four times the size of a stamp and containing twenty or so pages with printing on one side and line drawings on the other. The print told of a simple event, like a farmer feeding his pigs. Then you turned the book over and riffled through the pages of line drawings and you saw, like an animated cartoon, the farmer fall into the sty and come up with a banana peel on his head. You talk about funny!

  The illusion of motion created by the retention of image on the retina was a revelation to me. I had penetrated the mystery of how the movies actually moved. Years later, I would write scholarly articles and a book on film theory and linguistics, all flowing from the magic hours I spent riffling through Riffle Books. I slowly amassed a fair collection, and I would oblige my poor sister to sit through my ‘movie shows’ until her eyelids drooped with boredom.

  ’Taint What You Do (it’s the way whatcha do it)...

  I’ll Be Seeing You...The Umbrella Man...We’ll Meet Again...

  For all of my mother’s planning and care, our $7.27 sometimes ran out before the week was over, and this was particularly hard if it coincided with times when there were no dried potatoes and dried onions to be had down at the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation warehouse. We were obliged to buy more of our food on Mr Kane’s slate, which would put us in the hole, and it always took a couple of months to work our way out, paying it off a dime here, fifteen cents there. During one such time my mother pretended not to be hungry so that my sister and I could have bigger portions. But I refused to eat if she wouldn’t eat. She snapped that she was the head of this goddamned family and I’d better goddamned well do what I was told. “The last thing I need is sass from you, young man!” But I tightened my jaw and refused to eat. She yelled and loudly slapped the table close to me—she very seldom slapped us—then she suddenly broke down crying, overwhelmed by the injustice of it all. “All right!” I said. “I’ll eat! I’ll eat!” And I stuffed the food down, swallowing tears of rage with it. Even after I grew up, I never enjoyed dining out as a social event. I came to include eating among the other basic biological functions I don’t care to perform in public.

  The rage I felt wasn’t directed against my mother, but I wasn’t able to tell her that because we were both too upset. It was rage at the injustices that are a necessary effect of capitalism, because wealth is meaningless without relative poverty. What joy is there in being rich if you have to empty your own garbage cans, wash your own floors, pick your own vegetables, mow your own lawns, die in your own wars? There must be poor people against which the rich can measure
their success.

  All the Things You Are...I Didn’t Know What Time It Was...

  This Can’t Be Love...If I Didn’t Care...

  Mr Kane had been following events on his short-wave radio and he pointed out that the Czechs had, for obvious reasons, built their defensive fortifications on the German border. In allowing Hitler to take the Sudetenland, England and France let him nip off the carefully constructed frontier defenses, and now nothing but a few wooden customs gates stood between the Germans and Prague. In March of 1939, almost exactly a year after what Mr Kane had called the Austrian anschluss, Hitler entered Prague and declared Bohemia and Moravia ‘protectorates’, while agricultural Slovakia became a nominally independent state whose crops and livestock passed through the German market.