The Crazyladies of Pearl Street Read Online Free PDF Page A

this crap, I'd open that soda quick enough. And I'd pour it down the sink!”
    “But you can't. That'd spoil everything!”
    “A big goddamn Saint Patrick's party! That's just like your father. You don't know his ways. I do. Always the big noise. The big show! He leaves us in the lurch for four years without so much as a word, and we don't know if he's alive or dead or what the hell, and now he's going to throw a big party, and that's supposed to make everything just fine and dandy! And the worst of it is that he's probably going to get away with it. Sure! When you kids are grown up, it won't be the years I've shrimped and saved and worked my fingers to the knuckle that you'll remember. It won't be how I've had to worry and fret, scared that I'd get real sick, and then what'd happen to you, I'd like to know. No, what you'll remember will be Ray's goddamn green Saint Patrick's Day cake! He runs away leaving me with all the work and worry, then he comes back with a big splash and we're all supposed to forgive him! Goddamn him to hell! And we're not even Irish!” But she shook her head and I knew that she was perversely proud of his cheek and élan. Who else would have had the brass to throw a party instead of saying he was sorry? Throughout the years we had been alone, whenever Mother got fed up with struggling to keep us in food and clothing, and especially when she was afraid she might be hospitalized with one of her lung attacks and social workers might come and take us kids away from her, she would give vent to her disappointment and fury. But after accusing him of being weak and irresponsible and selfish, she always ended up mentioning, in a give-the-goddamned-devil-his-due way, that he was a smooth dancer and a nifty dresser and that he had buckets of charm and what she called 'real class'. Ruby Lucile LaPointe wasn't the sort to fall for just any pair of trousers. No, sir.
    My sister and I knew our father only from a photograph taken during their two-day honeymoon in New York City in 1929: a slim, handsome man in a white linen summer suit, the jacket held open by a fist on one hip to reveal a silk waistcoat, a straw boater tipped rakishly over one eye, his smile at once knowing and boyishly mischievous. After their honeymoon, he sent Mother back to the village of Granville to stay with her cousin Lorna and her husband while he went down to Florida to join up with friends who had let him in on a foolproof enterprise that would make him lots of money fast. Something to do with land speculation. He would return at the end of the summer and they could begin their life together. On Easy Street, Toots! Over the next two weeks, my mother received a letter from him every day, then one a week for the next month, then silence, and her letters to him were returned 'Address Unknown'. I was born nine months and six days after their marriage, and as soon as she was strong enough after a difficult birth (I heard the clinical particulars of this exceptionally long and arduous birth many times) we moved away from Lorna and her husband, who always grumbled about having to share his house and food with a cousin-in-law and her squalling brat. Mother got a job as a waitress in the summer resort where she had met my father, and we lived there until a letter from my father was forwarded to her by her cousin. He had run into some 'trouble' that led to his becoming an honored guest of the state of Florida for a year and a day. He hadn't written because there was nothing she could do to help him, so what was the point of distressing her? But he was a free man again, and a wiser one, and he was coming back north to meet some friends in Montreal who were letting him in on a sure thing. He stopped off on his way and spent one night with us at Lake George. I think I remember a man who came bearing a very big teddy bear, but I might only be remembering my mother's description of his arrival on our doorstep, tipsy, singing, and bearing an oversized