The Crazyladies of Pearl Street Page 6

  “Logic. Observation. Deft reasoning. And a dash of raw guesswork. A woman comes home in the rain without a coat. The next morning, a boy comes in to buy groceries when he should be starting in school. Deduction? There is sickness in the house. Alternative deduction? Or maybe not.”

  In fact, we had run out of Balm Bengu and were low on aspirin, so after breakfast I told Anne-Marie to look after our fitfully dozing mother while I ran down to the drugstore on Clinton Avenue. “But I don’t know what to do!” Anne-Marie said. “Just sit here and hold her hand,” I told her. “But what if she coughs and can’t breathe?” “That won’t happen.” “But if it does?” “Sh-h-h, you’ll wake her up. Just do what I say!” “You’re not boss of me!” “I’ll give you a slap!” “I’ll tell Mamma!” “Oh for Christ’s sake!” “And I’ll tell Mamma you swore!” “Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll be right back!” “No, don’t leave me alone.” I left.

  The woman behind the drugstore counter took my money and gave me the Bengu and my change. When I reminded her that I also needed aspirin, she asked how old I was. I told her, and she said she wasn’t allowed to sell aspirin to a six-year-old. I started to explain that my mother was ill and—but the woman just pursed her lips and said that rules were made to be obeyed, then she flashed a smile at the next customer and ignored me. I left and stood on the street corner looking up and down for another drugstore, but there wasn’t one in sight. Suddenly I panicked. What was I going to do? Mother needed aspirin to keep the fever down. I couldn’t leave Anne-Marie alone with her for long. What could I do? Then I got mad. My French-’n’-Indian temper flashed. I returned to the drugstore and told the woman I wanted the aspirin right now! She repeated that she was not allowed to sell—

  At the top of my voice I screamed that my mother was dying! Customers gasped and gaped. A prissy man in a white jacket came around the end of the counter. “Now, little boy—” But I continued to scream that my mother was dying and she needed aspirin and she was dying and she needed aspirin and she was dying! People out on the street stopped and stared through the shop window. The man in the white jacket whispered harshly to the woman, who slipped me a bottle of aspirin and told me to get out. And stay out! She didn’t even ask me to pay. I ran home with the aspirin and the Bengu. I had learned a lesson that would serve me well for several years. The use of only partially controlled rage would save me from being bullied when I enrolled in P.S. 5, just down the street from 238.

  It was mid-April by the time Mother was well enough to sit up in bed and play honeymoon pinochle with me, her grip so weak that sometimes the cards would slip from her fingers and she’d laugh feebly at her feebleness, and I knew she was going to get well. Anne-Marie’s paper-doll games no longer had to do with doctor and nurse, and she slept through the night without waking up in gasping panic. She stopped sucking her fingers. The most salient sign that Mother was herself again was a late-night gab session after pinochle in which she sketched out our future once ‘her ship came in’. I would become a rich and famous doctor or lawyer, or a business tycoon making money hand over glove, and we’d all live in a grand house on a hill somewhere. Her eyes came alive as she described in detail the fine furniture we would have, and the delicious things we would eat: T-bone steaks and watermelon every day, just the sweet seedless heart of the watermelon, we’d throw the rest away, and we would never again have to shrimp and save, not after our ship came in!

  As soon as she was strong enough, Mother enrolled me for what was left of the school year. She had wanted me to go to a Catholic school where I would get a better education, but in the end she sent me to P.S. 5 just down the street because if I was close by I could continue my schooling even when she was in bed with lung fever. I could make breakfast and care for her in the mornings and return during lunch period to see how she was doing and make her some soup, then I could get home immediately after school; but if I were at Our Lady of Angels school seventeen blocks away up the Lexington Avenue hill, I would have to take days, even weeks, off from school every time she got sick, and that would not only ruin my education, but it would alert the authorities to the fact that she was ill, and they might try to take us kids away from her. So I was to go to P.S. 5 for the time being...just until her lungs got stronger.

  Miss Cox

  AS IT turned out, I went to P.S. 5 for three years before transferring to Our Lady of Angels, while Anne-Marie was able to begin at the little convent school only two blocks from our apartment. The parish paid her fees, and the sisters made her uniforms, so it didn’t cost us anything to send her, and she loved the convent school and the sisters, who were delighted by her shy grace and her refined features. When it came to looks, Anne-Marie had inherited all the beauty genes, both from my mother who, although a plain, petulantly frowning little girl in the one sepia photograph we had of her, had metamorphosed into a vivacious knockout of a flapper by the time she was sixteen years old, and from my father, whose mischievous good looks were a major asset to his life of conning and conniving. One of the younger nuns enjoyed plaiting Anne-Marie’s long blonde hair, and they would ask her to sing and dance for them, then they would applaud while she blushed, very pleased.

  I had gloried in school in Lake George Village, where I was treated as something special because I could read and write while other kids were still chanting their ABC’s. I was allowed to sit at the back of the room reading at a little table of my own, and from time to time the teacher would come and ask me about what I was reading, or give me a little writing task to do. I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t read and write. Starting before I was a year old, my mother read me picture books from the library, and later she read the cereal boxes to me each morning before she went to work: ingredients and recipes from the sides of the boxes, stories from the back, and the practical ‘cowboy life’ tips that were printed on the cardboard spacers between layers of Shredded Wheat, like the trick of putting your lasso in a circle around you when you’re sleeping on the ground during a cattle drive, because rattlesnakes hate to crawl over rope. I’ve never forgotten that bit of wilderness lore although I confess I’ve never had occasion to use it, but if I had, I’d have wanted assurance in advance that the rattlers knew the rules. Mother would read the cartoon or the card so I got the idea of it, then she’d go over it again slowly, pointing to each word as she said it until one day, according to her, my face lit up as I suddenly understood that the letter cluster and the word sound meant the same thing!

  One morning, my mother was changing my newly arrived baby sister while I was eating breakfast, and she suddenly became aware that I was reading the cereal box aloud to get a little attention. At first, she thought I must be repeating what I had memorized from her earlier reading. But you could have knocked her down with a feather bed when she realized that this was a new kind of cereal and I was reading...really reading.

  Typically, my mother immediately decided that I was a genius, and that I would bring success and riches to our little family by appearing on station WGY’s weekly ‘Child Wonder’ slot, a tri-city precursor to the nationally popular program, The Quiz Kids. She used to brag to whoever would listen that “Not only can he read, my boy, but he’s developed a vocabulary,” and it was true that I sought to elicit praise by trucking out my most exotic words. ‘Riboflavin’ was a favorite gleaned from my in-depth reading of cereal boxes, but a little difficult to work into a conversation. As you see, I was well on my way to becoming an insufferable little wiseass. But as it turned out, being a wiseass was the one thing about me that was universally applauded by the kids on North Pearl Street, even the dimmest. They admired cheekiness in all its forms, and particularly cheekiness in the face of authority.

  I was anxious to get back into school after missing a whole month because I was afraid I would be behind and have to work hard to catch up. I needn’t have worried. Expectations were low at P.S. 5 where most of the kids were unmotivated, few had models of excellence at home or praise for inte
llectual accomplishment and many were just stupid. Nor were the teachers much better. Some of them had long ago forsaken real teaching and had settled for policing, some were disenchanted after years of frustration, and some had been low-grade teaching material to begin with. Because I had been far ahead of my first-grade class at Lake George, my mother decided to put me into the second grade at P.S. 5, where I was astonished to discover that these bigger kids read haltingly and some still didn’t even know the alphabet. I had been miles ahead at Lake George; here I was a visitor from a distant planet. I could see that I was in for long days of boredom.

  But first there was the humiliating ordeal of being introduced to the class, which looked at me as a robin looks at a worm. The pretty young second-grade teacher was new enough to the profession to be still making an effort. I don’t remember her name, but her bright little eyes above an up-turned smile, made her look like an umlaut U. She twittered how interesting it must be to have a French name. Don’t we think so, class? Then she wrote ‘Jean-Luc LaPointe’ on the blackboard and pronounced it in a French-ish sort of way. She said she was sure the class would be interested to know how my family pronounced it. Wouldn’t we, class? I told them we pronounced it John Luke LaPointe (with no nasal in the last name). But for the next couple of weeks I had to deal with being called Jean, a girl’s name. During recess out in the fenced-in playground of cracked and scabby macadam I was teased about my name, and this led to more bullying after school and to confrontations and fights, the usual ritual ordeal all new kids face. I was wiry and quick, but the opponents I tangled with were a year older and bigger than I, and they were tough street kids. Fortunately, I had an edge...well, two edges, really. My first edge was the tactic of focused rage I had learned in the drugstore that had refused to sell me aspirin. While my tormentors were still in the chest-pushing, ‘Wanna make something of it?’ preliminaries to battle, I would be totally silent, afraid and nauseous as I hovered for a moment on the rim of battle, then I would unleash a flood of blind rage and get two or three shots in before my antagonist realized we had gone to Fistcity. I would strike out with a jugular fury that squirted adrenaline into my blood, making me stronger and oblivious to incoming damage and pain. I punched kicked bit elbowed and gouged anything I could reach, while my opponent clumsily tried to stifle my frenzied attack as one might try to smother a grass fire by flapping a damp handkerchief at it. My second edge was that I absolutely refused to give up. Bigger kids could throw me down or knock me down, but as soon as I managed to struggle out of their grasp, or they got tired of holding me down I plowed into them again. I almost always lost in the end, but although I would come home messed up, they never got away without a few bruises and some blood. After a while they gave up teasing and bullying because there wasn’t much glory in beating up a smaller kid, and they were sure to reap a harvest of pain for their trouble. They saved face by just walking away from showdowns shaking their heads and muttering that this new kid was crazy. I mean crazy! In time, my existence in school and on the block came to be accepted, and I was left alone. In return, I often concealed my intelligence and bookish curiosity, sometimes by pretending not to know the answers to teachers’ questions, and occasionally by making wisecracks in class, or funny faces behind some admiring teacher’s back after she had complimented me. This involved treachery against my own intellectual caste, and I always felt a little ashamed afterwards.

  I only had to put up with that saccharine, intensely concerned second-grade teacher for a couple of weeks before she brought me to the principal’s office, complaining that I was too far ahead of her class and she just didn’t know what to do with me. And there was another thing. I was always starting fights. It seemed I was a little bully. (Teachers never know what’s really going on.) The principal, a sere woman with colorless hair twisted into a bun so tight that the corners of her eyes were drawn back, pointed out that there was only a month left before vacation, so I might as well be sent directly to the third grade, so Miss Cox could get to know me before I started regularly with her the following autumn.

  Neither the second-grade teacher nor the principal worried about the fact that I would thenceforth be with kids two years older and bigger than I, and some of them even more, for this was before teachers dodged responsibility by falling back on the ‘social pass’ that would fill urban high schools with sullen sub-literates. In the ’Thirties, a student stayed in the third grade until he was able to do fourth-grade work, or until they gave up on him and sent him to a manual arts school, where he was taught how to bang out copper ashtrays or make a crystal radio by winding wire on a toilet roll. When he reached the school-leaving age of sixteen, he went out into the world to look for work on the basis of his copper bashing and toilet roll winding skills.

  Miss Cox was P.S. 5’s dominant figure. I suppose she was in her mid-fifties when I met her, but you would no more think of her in terms of age than you would ask how long gravity had been around. She was tall and broad-shouldered, although surprisingly thin when viewed from the side. Her face was wide, but even so her features seemed crowded together: a prominent hooked nose with a red birthmark on one side, large deep-set glittering eyes beneath thick eyebrows, full, rather pendulous lips accented by bright red lipstick and dyed orange hair, which was so thin that her white scalp showed through. Her taste in clothing was expressive to the verge of eccentricity. Her long skirts, a different one for each school day, were made from what looked like upholstery fabric, and she wore white satin blouses with stand-up collars, padded shoulders, and full sleeves that buttoned tight at the wrist and rippled with each gesture, like a swordsman’s shirt in a cloak-and-dagger movie. She often tucked two or three patterned silk handkerchiefs into a broad leather belt, and these fluttered around her as she moved, as did the long-tasseled oriental scarf she draped over her shoulders, its ends flipped over her wrists. She wore copper bracelets and long loops of colored glass beads that swung and rattled and clinked with her quick, angular movements. The timbre of her voice ranged from rich chocolate-contralto speech through to cascading soprano laughter.

  Miss Cox was determined to broaden the minds and lift the spirits of every slum child whom Fate had placed in her care, and the classroom over which she reigned for more than a quarter of a century reflected both her mission and her personality. In her exquisite Palmer hand she wrote aphorisms and maxims in various colors of chalk on the blackboard, reminding us that ‘The lost minute can never be recovered’, or enjoining us to ‘Reach for the stars’, or warning us that ‘Senseless haste is the enemy of speed’. She added new admonitions and adages when she thought the old ones had had time to soak into our collective unconscious, but because she often had to erase to make space for classwork and illustrations, it was not uncommon for only fragments of the maxims to be left on the blackboard for a week or two: messages such as ‘Reach...’ which was what a cowboy said when he drew his gun on a bad guy, or ‘Senseless haste is...’, a baffling existentialist affirmation. There was a pin board covered with layers of constantly refreshed pictures from National Geographic and other magazines showing us what life and people were like in Africa, Asia and Europe, so we wouldn’t get the idea that the universe ended at the corner of Pearl and State Streets. “There is a whole wide world out there, children, and it’s yours for the taking.” And there was a large modern globe next to a globe showing the world as it was conceived during the Age of Discovery. She often compared these two to demonstrate that the accepted truths of a given time can change, and that there are new truths all the time. Most interesting of all to me was what Miss Cox called an orrery, a complex model of the solar system with wires and strings and a crank that she would sometimes turn so we could see the relative motion of the Earth and its moon, and the other seven planets (no Pluto because the orrery was pre-1930). And there was a scuffed and battered upright piano on which she played every morning, lifting her wrists high from the keyboard and holding that graceful balletic gesture for a moment befo
re slamming down on the emphatic chords of the morning sing-song, which she believed was good for both our lungs and our souls.

  Covering every surface—tables, windowsills, bookcases, the piano top—was a gallimaufry of broken pottery, driftwood snarls, ‘interesting’ bits of rock, twisted metal...anything she thought might inform or inspire our aesthetic sensibilities and make us realize that beauty was all around us; and hanging from the nails she had pounded into the walls with the heel of her stout shoe, there were swatches of fabric and ribbons and feathers and colored paper, anything that caught her eye and seemed stimulating.

  Alone of all the teachers at P.S. 5, Miss Cox never had trouble maintaining order, despite her willingness to let us move about the classroom with a freedom that other teachers didn’t dare to permit, lest it lead to stampedes, even insurrections. She would suddenly order us out of our desks and onto our feet whenever she decided that it would be good for us to move our bodies in ‘free dance’ to the thumping rhythms of her piano. The sheer mass and intensity of her personality awed the class into good behavior. Even the sullen older boys who sat, root-bound, in small desks at the back of the room responded when she smiled dazzlingly at them and chanted in two bell-clear notes, “pos...ture, gentlemen! Pos...ture!” They would sit up straight, although they did so with the bored listlessness necessary to affirm their roles as tough kids. She used to bring in large prints of famous paintings to show to the class, and she would tell us why they were famous and what we should look for “...because art is for everybody.” In addition to the usual third-grade subjects, she introduced us to the joys of elocution and clear diction. “...because ideas are expressed in words, and the clearly spoken word reflects a clearly understood idea.” I leave to your imagination the sounds produced by the tough older boys in the back row when obliged to ‘round their vowels’ and ‘be mindful of terminal consonants’. But they would do their best, then they’d glower around the class, daring anyone to laugh...or even smile. I loved the sound of her ‘elocution’ voice and I was a natural mimic, so it wasn’t long before I was imitating the precise diction and rich pronunciation of radio actors as I talked animatedly to myself in the course of the intricate story games that occupied most of my free time; but I always fell back on the flat, dental sound of urban New York when dealing with people on North Pearl Street because that was the only sound they took seriously. When that aggressive street speech was bolstered by profanity, it was more likely to produce respect and compliance than the fruity sounds of Claude Rains or Orson Welles, which would probably have earned me a sneer and a fat lip.