The Crazyladies of Pearl Street by Trevanian

Author:Trevanian [Trevanian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Historical, Coming of Age
ISBN: 9780307238504
Google: LIopwuMCIV8C
Amazon: 1400080371
Publisher: Broadway Books
Published: 2005-06-06T23:00:00+00:00

A Cowboy Called Ben

In the fall of 1940 a powerfully built but hastily assembled man from out West rented one of the low-ceilinged rooms on the top floor of our building, rooms that were usually occupied by drifters passing through, or by old men, lonely, furtive and seldom seen on the street, many of whom moved out late at night to dodge paying their rent, and a few died in their rooms. They were rented 'semi-furnished', meaning a bed of sorts, a wobbly table, one or two chairs and usually one other piece of anonymous, functionless furniture that somebody had put in one of these top-floor rooms to be rid of it: a hall mirror, perhaps, or an umbrella stand, or a Victorian what-not cabinet with missing shelves and jammed drawers. The block didn't pay much attention to the transients who lived in top-floor rooms because they weren't really part of our society, but this new young man from the West, whom everyone called Ben (but whose last name no one knew) turned out to be a more permanent resident. He got a job on the loading dock of the brewery, where he worked hard and kept to himself. But the men of our block were suspicious of him when they discovered something about him that, in their view, was strange, even unnatural: Ben didn't drink. He never pinched the odd quart bottle of ale and drank it out behind the boiler room, like the other loaders did. Easy-to-steal beer was a perquisite for the Pearl Street men who did two- or three-month stints on the loading dock before getting fired for loafing or for bad-mouthing the boss. Work on the loading dock was 'casual', meaning that you got paid cash-in-hand at the end of each working day and no records were kept. The work was hard and the pay low, but the Welfare couldn't check up on you and dock your ADC payment because you were making money on the side.

In addition to his suspicious abstemiousness, Ben was an object of curiosity and conjecture because of his Sunday suit. He worked six days a week, doing as much overtime as he could get. On his way back from the brewery each evening he bought something at Mr Kane's that he could heat up on his gas ring for supper, so no one saw anything of him except on Sundays when he would emerge at about ten in the morning, freshly bathed and shaved and wearing a double-breasted suit of that hairy, acid-green material you saw nowhere but in South Street's 'barrel shops' that hung suits, trousers, dresses and coats from rope lines out in front of the store, watched over by a merchant who didn't bother to rise from his kitchen chair tipped back against the door frame when a customer was sniffing around, and whose only gesture towards salesmanship was a shrug and an ironic 'it's you, lady, believe me' or a factual 'you ain't going to find cheaper'.

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