The Crazyladies of Pearl Street Read Free

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