The Crazyladies of Pearl Street Read online

This was my first encounter with one of the crazyladies of Pearl Street, some of whom were not really crazy at all, just eccentric or ‘different’, although a couple were crazy by anyone’s criteria. Over the ensuing years, my dealings with these crazyladies would punctuate the lurching, uneven stages of my growth and self-awareness.

  We had been sitting on the stoop for over an hour, expecting my father to come walking around the corner at any minute. When a man did approach, Anne-Marie and I looked up at our mother to read her reaction, because neither of us would have recognized him. But none of them was our father. The March air was cooling rapidly, and Anne-Marie in her thin party dress was rubbing her upper arms to warm them, so my mother rose and looked up and down the street one final time before saying, “Well, we can’t sit here until the cows freeze over! I’m going to take a gander inside. Maybe Ray told someone where he was going and how long he’d be. You kids keep an eye on our stuff.” And she went up the stairs and into the red brick tenement.

  She came back with an envelope she had found stuck into the crack of the door of apartment 2 on the first floor. Number 238 had no apartment 1, a designation the mail carriers reserved for basement apartments that looked through the iron bars of their low windows into wells sunken below the level of the sidewalk. But the brick row of seven identical five-story buildings that included 238 had only half-basements across the front, and that space was occupied by coal bunkers, huge old iron furnaces and boilers in varying states of dilapidation. Mother sat down between us and opened the envelope to find a note and a big old-fashioned key with a bow of green crepe paper tied around it. The note was from my father; it said that he had gone out to find a bakery that had a green cake for the party and he’d be back in a jiffy. A party? Green cake? Anne-Marie and I exchanged eager glances.

  “Well, we might as well get ourselves moved in,” Mother said.

  Leaving Anne-Marie to watch over our things, Mother and I struggled up the stairs carrying her old Saratoga trunk with its scuffed leather bindings. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the kids across the street watching me stagger under the weight of the trunk. I’d have given anything to be able to hook one finger in the leather handle and lift it...just like that!...whistling to myself, maybe. Yes, and carrying something huge in my other hand! That would have been great!

  I have always been particularly sensitive to smells, even squeamish, and when I stepped into that hall I drew my first breath of that medley of mildew, Lysol, ancient grease, rotting woodwork, sweat, rat droppings, coal dust, baby urine and boiled cabbage...the residue of a hundred and fifty years of poverty and hopelessness, damp and eternal in the nostrils.

  My mother and I staggered across the threshold of apartment 2, my arms feeling drawn out of their sockets by the weight of the Saratoga trunk we had dragged and scooted down the hallway’s scuffed and scruffy linoleum. We went into the kitchen to get a drink of water and were greeted by a vision. Obviously, the celebration my father planned was to be a Saint Patrick’s Day party, and he had pasted strips of green crepe paper ribbon into chain links that he had looped back and forth between overhead water pipes. He must have spent hours doing it. On the narrow kitchen table there were four green paper plates with shamrocks, and standing in the middle of the table was a big bottle of green soda, presumably lime.

  After drinking water directly from the faucet and getting our fronts wet in the process, Mother and I returned for more boxes and pieces of furniture. When we stepped back out onto our stoop Anne-Marie was standing in front of our boxes and furniture, her eyes shining with unwept tears of fear as she bravely interposed her little body between our possessions and the kids who had gathered to watch us move in. People had come out onto the stoops on both sides of our building and across the street, where they sat, the men sucking at quart bottles of ale, the women observing and frankly evaluating our efforts and our possessions. I would learn that watching people move in and out was a traditional community entertainment on North Pearl Street, not only because it offered an opportunity to see things that were usually hidden away in apartments, but also for the tantalizing narrative conjectures the event spawned. For those moving in, there were questions of where they had come from. What misfortune—or, better yet, disgrace—had brought them to North Pearl? What sort of people would they turn out to be? (The gossips of Pearl Street deplored two kinds of women, those who were ‘loose’ and those who were ‘snooty’, the one being every bit as objectionable as the other.) For those moving out, the suppositions were more dire and the gossip more juicy. Oh, a move away from Pearl Street might result from a bit of remarkable luck, like getting a job in some other town, or marrying a man with a job, but more commonly it was a final family dispersal caused by someone dying, or being sent to prison, or by losing their child-support benefits, and the family, no longer able to sustain itself as a whole even in such a last-ditch place as Pearl Street, had been evicted by the slum landlord. Where could they go? How could they live? Would they ever be seen again? And what if they had borrowed something from you? You’d better watch that they didn’t take it with them.

  Mortified to be the focus of this attention and conjecture, I worked hard to get us moved in quickly and away from their eyes and comments. To show the circle of kids that I was strong enough to take care of myself, I picked up things that were too heavy or too bulky for me to handle. To their sniggering amusement, I invariably had either an awkward struggle or a mortifying mishap in my effort to get whatever it was into the apartment, like when I finally managed to get a big box of mixed cleaning products to the top of the stoop, only to have the bottom fall out, leaving me holding the empty box while all kinds of stuff clattered back down the steps followed by a roll of toilet paper that unwound as it went, leaving a paper trail across the sidewalk and into the gutter. After chasing it down I had to re-roll it carefully, sure that all eyes were on me and that everybody was chuckling and snorting, but we couldn’t afford just to waste it. In my rush to get this humiliating task over with quickly I got the paper on crooked several times and had to unroll it and start again.

  While I fumbled in angry, unproductive haste I could see out of the corners of my eyes that the women were watching my mother lift big boxes and carry them with ease. She wasn’t all that strong, but she was adroit. She was only a little over five feet tall, but she was wiry and she moved with the grace that had won her trophy cups for dancing the Charleston and the Varsity Drag when she was a seventeen-year-old flapper, only ten years before. I could tell that the women, mostly flaccid and dumpy with eating bad food, felt an immediate dislike for my mother’s short page-boy hair, her bell-bottomed slacks, and her pert, even saucy, movement and gestures. “Probably both snooty and loose,” their sniffs said.

  Eventually we got all our boxes and bits into the apartment, which was rented ‘semi-furnished’, meaning there were four straight-backed wooden chairs each of a different design, color and epoch, two chiffoniers, one with drawers that stuck open, the other with drawers that stuck shut, a sagging double bed and a hand-made child’s cot in the back bedroom, a narrow table in the kitchen, and in the front room an iron daybed and, incongruous in the limited space, two wicker chairs with broken spines that caused them to twist and squeak when you sat in them and whose split canes scratched your legs and clutched at your clothes. But we were off the street and our possessions were no longer under the gaze of scoffers. Worn out with having done most of the work, Mother lay down on the daybed in the front room while Anne-Marie and I wandered through the apartment, looking into nooks and dark corners, imagining what our lives would be like in this strange new place. We flushed the toilet to see if it worked, and opened the tap in the old iron bathtub until the rust-brown water thinned to tan, then ran clear. (Apparently, the prior renters weren’t great bath-takers.) We peeked into cupboards and the apartment’s only closet. We opened the door of the lead-lined icebox and quickly closed it, gagging at the knee-buckling smell of a stale icebox
. Being a big brother, I threatened to push her head in and make her breathe the stink; being a little sister, she threatened to tell our mother if I did, then I’d get it. She claimed the little child’s cot in the corner of the bedroom; just right for her, because she too was little, and she would be close to Mother in the big bed, just in case someone had bad dreams and wanted to crawl in next to someone else.

  As Anne-Marie looked on, her head through the railings in the back hall, I crept down the dark stairs to the basement from which a clammy, ominous chill rose to meet me. Being watched by my kid sister, I was obliged to go all the way down and even open the basement door a crack and peek in, but then I heard something—or thought I did—and I came dashing back up, shouting as I ran so it would seem as though I were trying to scare Anne-Marie, not that I was scared myself. But time and again, we found ourselves back in the kitchen, attracted to the looping festoons of green crepe paper and the Saint Patrick’s Day paper plates and napkins and green soda for our party. We kept an ear cocked for our father’s return with that green cake. A green cake!

  Number 238 was at the center of seven identical brick row houses that had been built as private homes in the 1830s, when Pearl Street was a middle-class residential street that had the advantage of being close to the teeming commercial wharves where merchants did their business. To reflect the social aspirations of its original owners, the entrance halls of all seven houses were wide, so there was room for only three interconnecting rooms on the first floor, rooms that were used for entertaining and impressing guests, so they were high ceiling’d, had ogee moldings and chandelier rosettes (but no longer any chandeliers), and the room giving onto the street had two tall windows. In most of the houses in our rows, these spacious first-floor rooms had been converted into three one-room studio flats with little kitchen nooks in the corner, a sofa that opened into a bed, and a shared bathroom at the end of the hall, just right for single old people who couldn’t manage the stairs; but ours had been left as one apartment with a formal receiving room in front, giving on the street, a windowless middle room that had formerly been the dining room but now was more like a big hall and all-purpose storage space that you had to pass through to get to the other rooms, and a smaller back withdrawing room that had been partitioned into a bedroom and a small kitchen, with a door that gave onto a bathroom so narrow that the toilet, the tub and the washbasin were all in a row. The original kitchens had been in the basement, and all meals had been carried up to be served. The second floors of the seven identical houses had contained a withdrawing room (’drawing room), a study or office, the master bedroom, and a generous dressing room cum lady’s retiring room at the back of the building. These had been converted into two three-room apartments, each with a minute bathroom. Second-floor apartments were considered the best in any tenement and always cost more than others because they had biggish rooms and you only had to walk one flight up to get away from the noise, grime and threat of the street. Few on welfare ever lived on the second floor, which was reserved for ‘a better class of people’. The third and fourth floors had originally been the family bedrooms, which had been converted into flats sharing an end-of-the-hall bathroom. Typical of Georgian fenestration, the windows were smaller the higher you went, so the fifth floor had the very small windows and the low ceilings of what had been servants’ quarters. The cramped rooms on the fifth were the cheapest, not only because of the long climb up, but also because they were beneath the uninsulated flat roof and therefore were hot in summer and cold in winter. A bitter street joke said that people living on fifth floors had no right to complain about simmering all summer and freezing all winter because, in fact, the average yearly temperature up there was just about perfect.

  The overall effect of our building, with its traces of erstwhile refinement in the intricate plasterwork now muffled beneath coats of ancient paint, was one of fallen gentility, of tawdry elegance. An old gentlewoman with her front teeth knocked out in a bar brawl.2

  We thought ourselves lucky to have three big rooms, but we soon learned that first-floor flats were cheap because they were not considered desirable, in part because their windows were within reach of drunks and vandals leaning out from the stoop, so people could never sleep with them open, no matter how hot the weather got. Also, the rooms were awkwardly shaped because of the space lost to the big entrance hall and two flights of stairs, a broad one ascending to the second floor ’drawing room, and a dark narrow one down to the coal bunker and furnace in the basement. The front receiving room, however, with its high ceilings and ornate if paint-clogged plaster cornices had retained a certain forlorn grandeur, and here I was to sleep on the iron daybed for the next eight years, and here I listened to adventure programs on our Emerson radio, and here, late into the night, I knelt on a pillow at the big front window in the dark, and I daydreamed as I watched the street, when winter snow sifted down diagonally across the pane, or when plump drops of spring rain burst upon and wriggled down the glass, and sometimes in summer I would open the window (it was safe to open because it only came up about three inches before its warped frame jammed) and let the cool late-night air flow over my face as I listened to the melancholy sound of trains down in the freight yards that separated Pearl Street from the wharves and warehouses of the Hudson. In all seasons I was intrigued by late-night life on Pearl Street: sleepy lovers walking because they had no place to go, her head on his shoulder; befuddled drunks stepping off the curb with neck-snapping jolts, then looking back and swearing at the pavement for its duplicity; the rotating light of prowl cars grazing smears of red over the brick walls when the cops came to investigate a complaint or arrest someone...and sometimes the obscure wanderings of Pearl Street’s crazyladies.

  Having investigated our new home, Anne-Marie and I were in the kitchen, looking at the bottle of green soda and thinking about that green cake. She sighed and said she was really, really, really hungry. Poor Anne-Marie. We hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and food was more crucial to her sense of well-being than it was to mine or Mother’s. When she drank hot chocolate, she would look into the bottom of her cup and hum with pure pleasure, and she got light-headed and frightened when she was hungry; but she hadn’t said a word because she didn’t want to spoil the Saint Patrick’s Day party by eating just before it started. I went into the front room and woke Mother to tell her we were hungry. She dug into her change purse in that tight-fingered way that meant she was almost out of money and clawed out a quarter, and she sent me across to the cornerstore to get a loaf of bread and a small jar of peanut butter. Mother believed that peanut butter offered the best food value per unit of money you could buy. Meanwhile, she would locate the box containing our kitchen things and unpack it.

  “But don’t mess up the kitchen,” I reminded her. “We’ve got to keep everything ready for the party.”

  I crossed the street and passed, head down, through the knot of older kids that had returned to loiter in front of Mr Kane’s cornerstore.

  “Hey, kid! Where you from?”

  I didn’t answer. I had developed the tactic of pretending to be lost in my own thoughts to avoid having to deal with people.

  “What’s the matter, kid? Your ears broke? I asked where you was from.”

  He said ‘axed’ for ‘asked’. I shrugged and reached out for the door to the shop, but a kid grabbed my collar and pulled me back, so I muttered, “Lake George Village.”

  “What’s that? George what? Talk up, why don’t you?” He said ‘tack’ for ‘talk’ and ‘ya’ for ‘you’, and that troubled me. These local tribes didn’t even speak our language. It wouldn’t be long, however, before I learned to slip into the metallic, dentalized, slack-mouthed idiom of Northeastern street talk when I wanted to sound tough, and save my own accent for when I wanted to seem intelligent or polite.

  “We’re from Lake George Village,” I said more firmly than I felt.

  “Where’s that?”

  �
��Up-state.”

  “Hey, kid, got any money?” another asked.

  “No.”

  “Why you going to the Jew’s then? He don’t give kids no credit.”

  I tried to open the shop door, but someone grabbed my arm. “Come on, kid. Give us a nickel!”

  “No!”

  “You looking for a fist sandwich, kid?”

  The door of the cornerstore opened. “Well, well, what have we here? A gathering of the neighborhood’s best and brightest, is it? Our nation’s hope for the future?” It was the shopkeeper wearing thick glasses and a green cloth apron. “And who are you, young man? Well, come in if you’re coming in. I can’t stand around here all day. Time is money, as the watchmaker said.”

  I followed him into the store, hoping the kids would disperse before I had to go back home.

  In response to my request for a small jar of peanut butter, Mr Kane took up a long wooden pole with metal fingers that were manipulated from a grip in the handle. He grasped the jar of peanut butter on a high shelf of his narrow shop, plucked it away, then opened the metal fingers and let it drop. As I gasped, he snatched up the hem of his apron to make a nest for receiving the jar with a plop, the deft performance of a man who had show business in his blood. I would learn before long that only bad breaks and the Depression had brought Mr Kane to North Pearl Street as a shopkeeper. And it wasn’t show business he had in his blood, it was socialism.

  “And what else, young man?”

  “A loaf of bread,” I said. “...wait a minute. How much is the peanut butter?”

  “For you? Fifteen cents. For others? A nickel and a dime.”

  “Okay, and how much is a loaf of bread?”

  “Eleven cents. One thin dime and a somewhat thicker penny...which isn’t logical, but who said life has to be logical?”

  “Do you have small loaves?”