Crazy Ladies Of Pearl Street

The Green Cake My sister, my mother and I sat in a row on the front stoop of 238 North Pearl Street, feeling overwhelmed and diminished by the unfamiliar bustle of the big city. Beside the stoop was a stack of twine-bound cardboard boxes bulging with bedding, clothing and kitchen things. Around them were clustered our few scraps of furniture looking scuffed and shabby in the unforgiving glare of daylight. It was Saint Patrick's Day, and the mid-March sun felt good, but chill winter air still lurked in the shadows. The year was 1936; I was six years old, my sister was three, my mother was twenty-seven, and we were beginning a new life. We had been sitting on that stoop long enough for the gritty brownstone to mottle the backs of my legs between my short pants and my knee-high stockings. My sister wore a starched, frilly dress that Mother had bought out of money meant to tide us over until we got on our feet because she wanted Anne-Marie to look pretty the first time her father saw her, but the dress had got crushed during the long drive with the three of us crammed into half of the front seat of my uncle's rattletrap of a truck. And now we sat hip to hip on that step, Mother in the middle, my sister and I drawing comfort from contact with her, while she drew maternal strength and determination from contact with us. Anne-Marie was hungry and sleepy and close to tears. Taking her onto her lap, Mother looked anxiously up and down the street for my father whom she hadn't seen for four years, not since the morning he went out to look for work and didn't come back, leaving her with a toddler, a baby, and two dollars and some change in her purse. She didn't hear from him again until a letter arrived just three days earlier saying how sorry he was for running away from the family he loved, the family he had worried about every single minute since he left. There was no excuse for behaving like that, he admitted, but he just couldn't stand being made to feel he wasn't man enough to support his own wife and children. He had been sure that her family would give us a hand once he was out of the picture. He knew that Mother's father considered him to be little better than a flashy hustler and a con man--exactly what he was, in fact. The letter said that he had found a job and an apartment in Albany. Not much of a job and not much of an apartment, but it would be a start, and he had something big in the works. That letter had come in the nick of time, because the owner of Lake George Village's only all-year restaurant had just told my mother that he wouldn't be needing her as a waitress when the tourist season began. Her frequent absences during that winter when she was sick with lung trouble had shown him that she was unreliable, and he had decided to replace her. During the whole trip down to Albany, my uncle had grumbled about the time and money this was costing him, and when we didn't find my father waiting at the address he had given us, my uncle just unloaded our stuff in grumpy haste and left us there, saying that he had to make it back before nightfall because he didn't trust the headlights of his old truck. He was in such a hurry to get away that he drove off without shutting the passenger-side door, which flopped open. As he reached over to shut it he stepped on his brakes, causing the door to pinch his hand. He roared a curse as he furiously stomped on the gas to get the hell away from that goddamn hole of a goddamn slum, but the truck stalled and a car behind him sounded its irritated horn, so he shouted at the driver to go to hell and started up again, and he drove off pounding his good fist on the steering wheel, glad to see the end of his wife's goddamned freeloading cousin and her goddamned brats! Mother and I exchanged glances and couldn't help smiling. My father's letter had said that we should wait for him on the steps ofTrevanian is the author of 'Crazy Ladies Of Pearl Street', published 0000 under ISBN 9781400080366 and ISBN 1400080363.