{"product_id":"the-crazyladies-of-pearl-street-isbn-9781400080373","title":"The Crazyladies of Pearl Street","description":"\u003cb\u003eLegendary writer Trevanian brings readers his most personal novel yet: a funny, deeply  felt, often touching coming-of-age novel set in 1930s America. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Six-year-old  Jean-Luc LaPointe, his little sister, and his spirited but vulnerable  young mother have been abandoned—again—by his father, a charming con  artist. With no money and nowhere else to go, the LaPointes create a  fragile nest in a tenement building at 238 North Pearl Street in Albany,  New York. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor the next eight years, through the Great Depression and  Second World War, they live in the heart of the Irish slum, surrounded  by ward heelers, unemployment, and grinding poverty. Pearl Street is  also home to a variety of “crazyladies”: Miss Cox, the feared and  ridiculed teacher who ignites Jean-Luc’s imagination; Mrs. Kane, who  runs a beauty parlor\/fortune-telling salon in the back of her  husband’s grocery store; Mrs. Meehan, the desperate, harried matriarch  of a thuggish family across the street; lonely Mrs. McGivney, who spends  every day tending to her catatonic husband, a veteran of the Great War;  and Jean-Luc’s own unconventional, vivacious mother. Colorful though it  is, Jean-Luc never stops dreaming of a way out of the slum, and his  mother’s impossible expectations are both his driving force and his  burden.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e As  legendary writer Trevanian lovingly re-creates the neighborhood of his  youth in this funny, deeply moving coming-of-age novel, he also paints a  vivid portrait of a neighborhood, a city, a nation in turmoil, and the  people waiting for a better life to begin. It’s a heartfelt and  unforgettable look back at one child’s life in the 1930s and ’40s, a story that will  be remembered long after the last page is turned.“Nostalgic, richly textured. Sweetly evokes an innocent if hardscrabble lost age.” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Literary time travel, meticulously remembered and set down. . . . This book is in some ways a key to our country; America was made by people like this.” —\u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003eTrevanian lives in the French Basque region. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eShibumi\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Eiger   Sanction, The Loo Sanction, The Main, The Summer of Katya, Incident at Twenty-Mile\u003c\/i\u003e,   and \u003ci\u003eHot Night in the City\u003c\/i\u003e.  Visit trevanian.com for the Crazyladies cybernotes, Trevanian’s commentaries, items from the author’s desk, and more.\u003cb\u003eThe Green Cake\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDuring 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!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMother and I exchanged glances and couldn't help smiling.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy father's letter had said that we should wait for him on the steps  of the building because he was planning a big surprise for us, but  now Mother was tired of sitting there with people peering at us from  windows and stoops all around. She rose to go inside and look for  him, but I grabbed her wrist. Like most kids, I loved surprises, and  I didn't want her to ruin this one. Let's wait just a little while  longer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA couple of boys detached themselves from a knot of kids and  sauntered past our stoop, disdainfully eyeing our cardboard boxes and  our shoddy furniture, then letting their sassy eyes slide over me. I  knew that my short pants and knee socks made me an object of scorn to  these two boys dressed in knickers. From school I was familiar with  those universal rituals among boys when they puppy-sniff one another  for the first time, measuring and hefting for rank and dominance. I  could tell that the smaller of the two boys, a big-eared kid about a  year older than I, was wondering if this skinny new kid would turn  out to be a regular guy or a sissy, if I would fight my way out of  school-yard challenges or run to the teachers. I kept my eyes on him  as he strolled by, but I held him in a soft, tired look. To look  hard-eyed would be to send a challenge; to avoid his eyes would be to  submit. Boys are born with this canine pack-hunter's instinct for  caste and nipping order. After the kids had passed, one of them  crossed the street and spoke to a flat-faced, boneless woman sitting  on her stoop, obviously his mother, and I could see she was asking  him about us, especially about my mother, who wasn't anything like  the faded, marshmallow mothers of other kids. My mother was young and  slim and had short bobbed hair; she could dance and run and play  games, and she wore slacks in an era when few women did. I don't know  what the kid said, but his mother sniffed in a way that was both  competitive and dismissive. I was used to that sort of reaction to my  mother, but still sensitive about it. It wasn't that I wanted her to  be the same as other mothers. I was proud of her youthful good looks  and her feisty independence, but I sometimes wished she could be  different in a less obvious way because it's hard having a mother  who's different.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome bigger boys, fourteen or fifteen years old, loitered in front of  a cornerstore diagonally across the street from our stoop. Fully  aware of the gaggle of girls who admired them from two stoops away  and whom they ostentatiously ignored, the boys talked loudly, pushed  one another in gruff play, snorted out forced laughs and repeatedly  glanced at their reflections in the cornerstore window with  satisfaction, although now and then one of them felt obliged to hook  a comb out from his back pocket and drag it through his Brylcreem'd  hair, then press the sides into place with a caressing palm. They  played an endless round-robin of that finger game in which paper  covers rock, rock smashes scissors and scissors cut paper, known by  different names in various parts of the country, but called  'Rochambeau' in the urban Northeast by generations of kids who had no  idea that a French general who had helped our infant republic defeat  the British at Yorktown had been immortalized in a child's game, much  less how to spell the chanted sound as they threw their fingers out  on the '-bow!' of the third syllable. The loser of Rochambeau had to  let the winner 'knuckle' him, hit him on the top of the head as hard  as he wanted to with the knuckle of his middle finger. The one who  got knuckled would snort disdainfully although the pain sometimes  dampened his eyes with fugitive tears, which he quickly blinked away  as he rearranged his hair in the store window. Two of the boys were  smoking, the biggest one, who was the leader, and a small ugly one  who played the role of flunky and clown. They smoked like kids new to  smoking do, trying to appear supremely casual, but fussily examining  the burning ends of their cigarettes with grave frowns and tapping  off the ash more frequently than it could gather. These older boys  wore long trousers and were bare-headed, while the younger boys of  the block were in knickerbockers and caps. Only very young boys wore  short pants. Except for me, of course! The principal bane of my life  was my mother's need to dress my sister and me better than other  kids, in compensation, I suppose, for our lack of a father and a  secure breadwinner. Because she couldn't afford new clothes, the  hand-me-downs my sister and I wore were always cleaner and more  freshly ironed than those of our playmates, yet another of those  differences that kids will not endure.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe strange new sounds and gestures of life and play that I observed  with a mixture of fascination and malaise from our stoop that first  afternoon would, in the course of the eight and a half years I was to  live on North Pearl Street, become the unremarkable and unremarked  ambience of 'my block' with its noise, its squalor, its childhood  rites and ordeals, the awkward rutting rituals of its adolescents,  and its shoals of dirty brats with runny noses, nits and impetigo  playing their screaming games of kick-the-can or stick ball, sassing  icemen and pushcart vendors, blocking traffic and exchanging insults  with truck drivers who wanted to get through.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn that first day, the game of stick ball in the middle of the street  broke up when second base drove off. The preening boys in front of  the cornerstore drifted away down Livingston Avenue toward the  deserted warehouses between the freight yards and the river where, as  I would learn by being one of them, they would snoop around the  dripping, echoey, broken-glass-crunchy-under-foot, piss-smelling  vastnesses of abandoned buildings, and they would chuck stones at the  few window panes that remained tauntingly intact. North Pearl Street  was a typical slum of the first half of what would be called the  American Century. These slum blocks were identical in their essence  and social effects, varying only in the cultural decoration of their  ethnic concentrations. Pearl Street was Irish. More precisely, it was  bog Irish.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePearl Street was the sort of place that appeared, laundered and  tempered with humor and hokey sentimentality, in films starring the  Dead End Kids: sassy-mouthed but essentially good boys who only  needed one of Hollywood's grittier stars to sort them out and make  honest, hard-working citizens of them. But the violent,  reality-calloused kids of North Pearl would have scoffed at the  efforts of a tough (but warm-hearted) Father Pat O'Brien or a wryly  knowing Father Spencer Tracy to 'save' them by opening a boys' club  and showing them that priests could be reg'lar fellas.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile we were sitting on the stoop anticipating the surprise my  father had prepared for us, a thin layer of milky cloud began to  spread over the sky, and the chill of a March afternoon settled on  us. I was ready to give in and suggest that we go inside to look for  my father, when the front door of a building across the street flew  open, banging against the brick wall, and out poured a yelping,  shrieking pack of children belonging to what we would come to know as  the Meehans: a wild, drunken, dim-witted tribe that inhabited three  contiguous houses on the east side of the street. All the Meehans  were related in complex and unnatural ways. The four old Meehans, two  brothers and two sisters, had produced half a dozen loud, dirty,  boozy Meehan adults; and random, transient matings between and among  this second generation of brothers\/sisters\/cousins and their parents  had spawned some twenty offspring, who combined among themselves and  with the earlier generations to produce a scattering of  son\/nephew\/uncle\/cousin\/grandsons and  daughter\/niece\/aunt\/cousin\/granddaughters. While all the Meehans had  earned their family name at least twice over, only one of them was  called 'Mrs Meehan'. The rest were known by their full names: Old Joe  Meehan, the tribal chief, Young Joe Meehan, the heir apparent,  Patrick Meehan, the dangerous one, Maeve Meehan, the nasty one, or  Brigid Meehan, the willing one.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIronically, the one called 'Mrs Meehan' on the block was the only  woman of that tribe who was not related to the rest of the adults by  blood. One of the Meehan men had been put into an institution for the  dim-witted for a while, and he returned with a woman he had found  there. It was she who did most of the tribe's cooking, cared for the  younger children, and did such cleaning as took place in their  warren...mostly scattering the litter around by batting at it with a  ratty broom.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis 'Mrs Meehan' was the epicenter of the consternation and wailing  that erupted through their front door and poured down the stoop. She  was clutching a smoking iron skillet, and the kids surrounding her  were sobbing and screaming, 'Drop it, Ma! Drop it!' Her face was  twisted in agony because the skillet handle was burning her hand, but  still she clung to it, whimpering. A Meehan male appeared at the top  of the stoop wearing a sweat-stained undershirt, beer bottle in fist.  He shouted at 'Mrs Meehan' to put the goddamned skillet down, for the  love of Jesus! What did she think she was playing at, there?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Help me!\" she beseeched, the pain causing her to bare her teeth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut he only sniffed and shook his head. \"Crazy bitch.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA tousled female opened the front window of the next Meehan house and  thrust out her inflamed face, a cigarette glued to her lower lip.  \"What the hell?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"It's only herself,\" the man informed his sister\/cousin\/mate in a  tone of weary exasperation. \"Up to her old tricks, she is.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe woman shrugged and closed the window.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne of the children tried to wrench the skillet out of his mother's  hand, but he yelped and sucked at his burnt fingers. Just as my  mother took Anne-Marie off her lap and was rising to dash across the  street to help the poor woman, Old Joe Meehan, the doyen of the clan,  appeared at the doorway. His sunken cheeks were white-stubbled and he  had obviously just pulled on his tatty low-crotched trousers because  the flies were agape and he was still thumbing his suspenders up over  his bare chest and tufted shoulders. \"Jesus, Mary and Joseph!\" he  complained as he swatted his way through the swarm of kids.","brand":"Crown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303807406309,"sku":"NP9781400080373","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400080373.jpg?v=1767738865","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-crazyladies-of-pearl-street-isbn-9781400080373","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}