The Crazyladies of Pearl Street Read online

  With that ‘believe me you’ I think I’d better pause to explain that my mother’s defiant independence extended to refusing to speak like everybody else. She had a tendency to get common idioms and clichés just that annoying little bit wrong. You may have noticed, and winced at, some of the askew figures of speech in the dialogue I’ve recorded for her, and perhaps you put them down to shoddy copy editing or to the writer’s having momentarily nodded. In fact, I was trying to suggest my mother’s slippery grasp of popular vernacular. She complained, for instance, of always having to ‘shrimp and save’, and she would declare that it would be ‘a hot day in hell’ before she’d do this or that, rather than a cold one which, presumably, is somewhat rarer. Uninteresting things were ‘as dull as dish water’ for her, and a pious, hypocritical woman ‘looked as though her butter wouldn’t melt’. I learned many of these twisted idioms from her only to experience the smarting humiliation of being corrected by people who were attuned to more conventional usage. The effect of this was to make me abjure hackneyed expressions from an early age, so I suppose I benefited from my mother’s phrasal insouciance in the long run, although it’s possible that my automatic eschewal of clichés occasionally drove me from the Scylla of ridicule into the turbid Charybdisian eddies of sesquipedalian obfuscation...though I trust not.

  Mother’s battles against the machinery of official compassion could not begin until the following morning, so we spent the rest of that day unpacking and putting things in order, making a home for ourselves, and Anne-Marie’s spirits rose with the fun of playing house. Twice I was sent over to Mr Kane’s, first to get a bar of Fels Naphtha soap and another of Bon Ami window cleanser (with the chick that ‘hasn’t scratched yet’), floor wax, cockroach powder, and...mortifying cargo for any little boy to have to carry past other children...a large package of toilet paper; and a second time to get groceries and milk for our lunch and supper. Both times Mr Kane did his vaudeville turn of getting things off the high shelves with his long, steel-fingered can-grabber and dropping them into his green apron, all the while joking and prattling so that I hadn’t time to be embarrassed about asking him for more credit. While he was bagging up my purchases his wife, an unsmiling woman with features that seemed too big for her crowded face, came out from the back room and watched him to make sure he didn’t drop a free piece of candy into my bag, as he had the first time. She made a tight-lipped comment about her husband having wasted enough time helping ‘that new woman’.

  The next morning my mother appeared at her bedroom door ready to take on the big-shots. She spread her arms in a ‘Well, how do I look?’ gesture. She was dressed in a slacks suit she had recently made by hand from a glossy royal blue material. It had a close-fitting jacket and wide belled trousers that flopped when she walked, and on the side of her head she wore a cocky little bellhop’s hat that she’d made from the end of a cylindrical oatmeal box and covered with the same bright blue fabric and a bit of netting. It was her version of a costume Bette Davis had worn in a film. She saw strong parallels between herself and the characters Bette Davis played: women struggling in an unjust world ruled over by unreliable males. Bette Davis didn’t have to rely on men for anything. No, sir! Not Bette Davis!

  I told her she looked great, just great! But I secretly wished she had chosen something like other people’s mothers wore, something dowdy and simple, the kind of unchallenging clothes that people who need help from officialdom should wear.

  Leaving me to take care of Anne-Marie and buy something for our lunch over at Mr Kane’s, Mother went down the street, her bell-bottoms flopping with each pert step. I had suggested that she wear a coat because the March weather was unreliable, but she said that her old wool coat would spoil the effect of her Bette Davis suit...which was pretty much what I’d had in mind. But I was also afraid she might catch a cold that would lay her up for days or weeks with one of her ‘lung fevers’. Over the time we lived on North Pearl Street, she would end up in the hospital four times with pneumonia, which was often fatal in those pre-penicillin days, and each of these episodes gave the social services a chance to take Anne-Marie and me away from her on the grounds of her being, in the literal sense, an unfit mother.

  It was dark out when Mother got back to our apartment after a day of those demeaning delays, opaque instructions, complicated forms and accusatory interrogations that welfare systems use to protect society from fraud or laziness on our part, or excessive compassion on theirs. Her face was drawn and her eyes sunken with fatigue and hunger. She hadn’t brought any money for lunch because she didn’t have a purse that matched her Bette Davis creation and there were no pockets in the close-fitting slacks, so she had passed the bureaucrats’ long lunch break on a park bench, simmering with rage. I was afraid she might have caught a cold, but she was feeling triumphant. She described her day over the supper of tuna fish sandwiches and re-heated Campbell’s tomato soup that constituted the limit of my culinary capacities. All in all, she thought she had been victorious in her skirmishes with the Lords of Misery. I wasn’t so sure, and I winced at every ‘...so I gave her a piece of my mind, don’t think I didn’t!...’ and ‘...well, I didn’t let him get away with that crap!...’ and ‘...I told them a thing or two, believe me you...’. But at least she had come home in fairly good health and with her spirit unbroken, ready to continue the fight tomorrow.

  As it turned out, she was not obliged to engage the Establishment in battle the next morning. She had dressed up in her glossy blue Bette Davis slacks suit and was checking through the list of names and addresses that Mr Kane had made out for her, when there came a knock at our door. Our visitor was a rotund, tightly packed man in a shiny black three-piece suit and a derby, the first derby I had ever seen outside of comic strips, where their primary function seemed to be to get blown off by a wind that then rolled them into the road where they promptly got flattened by a steamroller that just happened to be passing by. The man wiped his hat band with a large handkerchief that he then applied to his copiously sweating face, before asking in a broad Irish accent, “Would you mind terribly, Missus?” Without waiting for an invitation he came into our apartment, lowered himself with a grunt into one of the creaking wicker armchairs, and began to fan himself with his derby. Mother stood at the door, her arms crossed, ready to throw this intruder out; and I stood beside her, ready to help, if that was necessary. “So then, Missus,” the ward heeler began. “We got a telephone call from your Mr Kane, explaining your situation. Have I the right of it when I say you’re an abandoned woman?”

  I could feel my mother tense up beside me. “What business is that of yours?” she asked.

  He explained that he represented the Third Ward, and that North Pearl Street was part of his turf. “You’ve been around to see the welfare people.” He swabbed his glistening forehead with his handkerchief as he consulted an official form that my mother had filled out the day before at the Aid to Dependent Children office. “You should have come directly to us, Missus. That’s what we’re here for. But no harm done. No harm done. Now I assume you’re married to the man who abandoned you?”

  “Now, just a goddamned min—”

  “And I assume these fine children here are the legitimate product of that marriage...darlings that they are, the poor abandoned things.” He smiled at Anne-Marie, who had slipped into the other wicker armchair and was looking at him with frank and frowning solemnity, wondering how anybody could sweat so much on a chilly day.

  “What are you trying to say?” Mother wanted to know. “Are you suggesting that my kids are—?”

  “I’m not suggesting a thing, Missus. But if these are the children of a legitimate and documented marriage, and if you have definitely been abandoned—I don’t mean just walked out on in a huff and maybe his lordship will be coming back in a few days—then the Ward could give you an emergency payment of ten dollars, five for each child, to tide you over until welfare people process your paperwork. It’s just
one of the little services the O’Conner brothers are happy to perform for those in need of a helping hand. You couldn’t possibly give me a drink of water, could you, young fellow? It’s purely burning up that I am. You see, Missus...” His voice dropped to a confidential timbre. “...I have this thyroid. It makes me hot and thirsty all the time. It’s the cross I bear. Oh, and sonny? You’ll run the tap until it’s cold, won’t you, fine young man that you are?”

  By the time I returned with the water, the confrontational atmosphere had cleared and Mother was sitting on the edge of my daybed with Anne-Marie on her lap. Whatever mistrust she had felt for the ward heeler had turned towards Mr Kane for telling strangers her personal business.

  “Well, you know, Missus, they’re all a little nosy and pushy,” the ward heeler said. “It’s in their born nature. But old Kane’s heart is in the right place, and he’s a Democrat to the bone. Which reminds me, Missus. You are a Democrat, aren’t you?”

  Like most of the poor of the Depression era, my mother idolized President Roosevelt, and would be a Democrat for the rest of her life, so the ward heeler didn’t have to worry about that. In his smarmy, circumlocutory way, he made it clear without saying it in so many words that the help he was offering was from one good Democrat to another, and he shared with us the fact that ‘the boys’ always knew how everybody voted, though he was damned if he knew how they found out, crafty devils that they were. In the end, he wrote a little note on the back of a form my mother had filled out the day before (we later wondered how it had ended up in his hands) and he told us that our case would be processed by the end of the month, when we would receive our first welfare check. There would be no further appointments for my mother to keep, no papers to fill out, no queues to stand in, no documents to be shown. The power of the O’Conner political machine had swept all these inconveniences aside. But of course, we understood that that which had been so easily bestowed could be taken back without trace of its ever having existed. After asking for another glass of water to slake his thirsty thyroid, the ward heeler grunted up from the squeaking armchair which clutched at his trousers so that it took a moment to disengage himself without excessive damage. He peeled two five-dollar bills off a damp roll he had dragged out of his pocket and gave them to Anne-Marie, who had never held that much money in her life.

  After he left, I made a point of saying that we were lucky Mr Kane had decided to contact the ward heeler. Mother shrugged as she threw away Mr Kane’s carefully drawn up list of names and appointment times. “We’re lucky that I’m a good Democrat, that’s what we’re lucky about,” she said, and I realized that Mr Kane’s efforts on our behalf had just lost their value.

  “Well!” Mother said. “Now that I’m on a lucky streak, maybe I’d better go hit up some restaurants for work! You kids finish putting things away and cleaning up. And Jean-Luc, you go across to the cornerstore and get something for your dinner. When I get back, the three of us will take a long walk downtown. Do some window-shopping. Take a look-see at this Albany. How’s that strike you?”

  As offhandedly as I could, I suggested that if she was going to look for work, maybe she should change her clothes...I mean, you know, because her silky blue slacks suit was too good for everyday and...I mean, well, it was so dressy and pretty that people might not believe she really needed work...or...well...Who knows? Maybe it was just the right thing to wear. You look great in it, Mom! Just great!

  It rained that afternoon, a cold diagonal rain driven on a March wind, and Mother came home with dark wet patches on her Bette Davis slacks suit and her bellhop hat a sodden mess. She was sniffling and feverish, and all through the night I could hear her hacking cough. The next morning she had a raging fever and was unable to lift her head from the pillow. “Don’t call for a doctor unless I tell you,” she said in a thin, raw voice. “We don’t want welfare people poking their noses around here. You know what to do, Jean-Luc. You’re my good right hand.”

  I did know what to do. We’d been through it three or four times every year since my grandfather skidded off the road in a snowstorm and crashed into a cement viaduct.

  The front room with my iron daybed became our sick room because it was too gloomy in her bedroom with its small window giving onto the sunken back ‘area’. For the next five days I nursed her. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I bathed her forehead and neck with a wrung-out washcloth when the fever was upon her, and hugged her within her Hudson Bay blanket when the bone-wracking chills came, and put my hand on her back and made comforting sounds when she was hanging off the bed, coughing and gagging and spitting phlegm into a basin that I would empty into the toilet, my face turned away from the greenish slime. I made up and applied mustard plasters to ‘loosen her up’. Her bouts of lung fever were so frequent that we kept in a drawer ready for use a box of dried mustard and half a dozen squares of cotton cut from an old sheet. The thick mustard and flour paste had to be made with boiling water to be effective, but I was always afraid that I would burn her skin, and I was distressed by the bright red rectangles the mustard plasters left on her back, rectangles into which I could push a white spot with my finger.

  Anne-Marie was so miserable and frightened that she retired into the back bedroom, where she walled off her fear by playing doctor and nurse with her paper dolls with desperate intensity: games in which the paper-doll doctor assured the paper-doll nurse that everything was going to be all right. The sick paper-doll mother would get well in no time, and then they’d all go out and have hot dogs and birch beer. She began to suck her fingers again, and when I tucked her into bed that night before going back to sleep in one of the creaking wicker chairs beside Mother, she clung to my hand until she slipped into a profound, frowning sleep, her eyes moving beneath her blue-veined lids in some desperate nightmare struggle. At times of emotional pressure, Anne-Marie would fall into so deep a sleep that I sometimes feared she would never awaken. She needed large draughts of calm and peace each day, like she needed food and drink, and she suffered if she couldn’t have them.

  I woke in the chair at dawn one morning, sweaty and with my clothes all twisted. The apartment smelled of mustard and eucalyptus, but Mother’s breathing was better and her skin was cool, even a little clammy. But that evening the fever and coughing began again and she had a three-day relapse that left her wan and frail.

  Finally the crisis broke and Mother lay back against the pillows and looked at me with vague, defocused eyes. She squeezed my hand to thank me. I squeezed back three squeezes, our secret family code for ‘I love you’, then I went in to her bed and slept the rest of that night and half of the next day.4

  Another typical attack of her lung fever had passed. In a couple of days she would be full of pep and playfulness again, ripping through the housework with her mania for cleanliness, playing street games with us, singing songs from ‘Your Lucky Strike Hit Parade’ or showing us dances from her heyday back in the ’Twenties. Her bouts of lung fever frightened me, of course, but not so much as they frightened my sister, who could only look on and dread the outcome of something she could do nothing about, while I had lots to do, and I took pride in the important role of carer and healer that made me, for a few days, boss of the house. I relished being permitted to stay home from school to care for her. So I coped fairly well with the physical fragility that lay just beneath the surface of my mother’s stubborn vivacity. Her emotional frailty, however, was a different matter.

  Just as her health could be shattered by the slightest chill or fatigue, so her moods could plunge overnight from resilient self-confidence to the darkest acedia, where life seemed hopeless and pointless. And there was the omnipresent threat of that famous French-’n’-Indian temper of hers, but while her self-indulgent, short-fused temper could punch a raw red hole into the middle of an otherwise good day, it always passed off quickly, leaving her sorry for having shouted or smashed something and eager to play with us or make us a treat to compensate for having beh
aved badly. The condition she called ‘the blues’ or ‘down in the dumps’ was longer lasting. For a week or more the spark was out of her and she couldn’t see how we could ever get free from the centripetal cycle of poverty, ill health and bad breaks. She continued to make meals, clean the house, wash and sew and mend, but there was no life in her voice, no lightness in her movement. She was a gray presence that dragged dully through the house exuding chill and despair.

  In time, she would pull herself out of the slimy depths of depression, back into the light of hope, but not without considerable emotional cost. And not only to herself.

  We children knew that Mother had had more than her share of bad luck and disappointments, and we knew that the struggle to keep us with her sometimes absorbed so much of her energy that she was left unable to ward off bouts of depression or to control her occasional rages. Anne-Marie and I understood this in that intuitive, non-verbal way that children perceive the emotions and attitudes of the adults around them. But for all our understanding, we still resented her bad moods, and felt guilty for resenting them. She was a wonderful woman, but not an easy woman to live with; her health was always close to collapse, her emotions always teetering on the threshold of black depression.

  It was during Mother’s first bout of lung fever in Albany that I learned her trick of using rage as a weapon. While she lay limp and helpless in bed after a night of fever and coughing, I went across to the cornerstore to buy food for breakfast. I offered to pay out of the ten dollars the ward heeler had given us, but Mr Kane said I’d better keep that for medications we might need from the drugstore. When I asked how he knew that my mother was ill, he drew his shoulders up to his neck in a thoroughly Levantine shrug.