The Crazyladies of Pearl Street: A Novel

The Crazyladies of Pearl Street: A Novel

Legendary writer Trevanian brings readers his most personal novel yet: a funny, deeply felt, often touching coming-of-age novel set in 1930s America. 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. For 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. 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.” — Publishers Weekly “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.” — Washington Post Trevanian lives in the French Basque region. He is the author of Shibumi , The Eiger Sanction, The Loo Sanction, The Main, The Summer of Katya, Incident at Twenty-Mile , and Hot Night in the City . Visit trevanian.com for the Crazyladies cybernotes, Trevanian’s commentaries, items from the author’s desk, and more. 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 whe