The Crazyladies of Pearl Street by Trevanian Read Free Book Online Page B

lest his wife do so). He told her he didn't want to pry or anything, but maybe he should also contact the local ward heeler. See if the machinery could be oiled to make it turn a little faster. Otherwise, we might have to wait months for our case to make its way through the turgid system. She thanked him for his help, but now there was a chill in her tone. I could tell that she was ashamed of having broken down before this stranger. As we crossed the street back to 238 she told me that I must always be careful with these people.
    “But Mr Kane was just trying to be...”
    “They have a way of worming things out of you.”
    “He wasn't worming any—”
    “You just be careful what you tell them, and that's final. Period!”
    Later that month, when we were able to begin paying something against our slate, my mother felt vindicated in her mistrust of 'these people'. She discovered that Mr Kane had charged her a nickel for each call he made on her behalf. I explained that this was only fair because he had put a nickel into the slot for each call, but she waved this aside, saying she was sure he made a little something on each call. Why else would he have a phone taking up space in his shop? No, they work every angle, these people, believe me you.
    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