I sat for a while on my stoop before going into our apartment where I knew my mother would be in bed, bored with her most recent siege of lung trouble and smelling of mustard plaster and Baume Bengue. Kids were playing stickball in the street, blocking traffic and exchanging insults with an impatient truck driver who wanted to get through. The game broke up when second base drove off, and the kids clustered around Mr Kane's corner store for a while, then drifted down Livingston Avenue towards the docks. I knew they'd end up wandering through the deserted warehouses down by the river, snooping around in the rubble-littered, piss-smelling, water-dripping vastnesses. They'd probably use their slingshots to shatter the few windowpanes that remained tauntingly intact, then, bored, they'd wander back and cluster again in front of Mr Kane's until someone thought of some other trouble to get into.

Kids had been playing stickball that day back in June 1936, when my mother, sister, and I first found ourselves sitting on the front stoop of 238 North Pearl Street, our clothes and bedding in cardboard boxes on the sidewalk, and our few pieces of furniture looking shamefully worn and shoddy in the unforgiving glare of sunlight. I was six years old, and my sister four. She was hungry and sleepy and close to tears after the long trip down to Albany from Lake George Village in our uncle's rattletrap of a truck. My mother looked anxiously up and down the street for my father. She hadn't seen him in five years, not since the morning he went out to look for work and didn't come back, leaving her pregnant with my sister and only two dollars and some change in her purse. Then a letter arrived saying he was sorry he had run away from the family he loved, but he just couldn't stand not being able to support us, and he knew that her family would give us a hand if he was out of the way. Mother's family hadn't approved of him because he was a gambler and a con man-fair enough reasons. Then, after five years without a word from him, a letter came out of the blue, saying he had found a job and an apartment in Albany, where we could make a new start. My uncle had had us on his hands since my father abandoned us, and he made no bones about resenting the time and money it cost him to bring us down to Albany, so when my father wasn't there in the street to welcome us, my uncle just unloaded our stuff in grumpy haste and left us there, hoping to make it back to Lake George before nightfall because his old truck had no headlights. Leaving my sister to watch over our things, Mother and I went into the red brick building to look for our apartment. That was my first experience of that medley of smells-boiled cabbage, mildew, Lysol, other people-that I would come to recognize as the smell of the slums, the smell of poverty and hopelessness, cold and eternal in the nostrils. There was an envelope stuck into the crack of the door of apartment #2, and in it there was the key and a note from my father saying that he had gone to buy something special for a party, and he would be back in a jiffy. We went back outside and sat on the stoop, waiting for him. We never saw him again.

For the next seven years we lived on North Pearl Street, a typical slum block of the Thirties. Shoals of dirty brats with runny noses, nits, and impetigo playing noisy games of kick-the-can or stickball in the street while unshaven out-of-work men in stretched, sweaty undershirts talked in loud voices from stoop to stoop on hot summer nights as they sucked at quart bottles of ale. They scoffed at those who had managed to get jobs. "You won't catch me kissing up to some boss just to get a job pushing a broom or digging a ditch!" Clearly, they were above that sort of thing. Only a handful of men on our block had regular jobs, a couple with the Bond Bread bakery on the corner, and a few doing part-time work on the loading platform of the Burgermeister brewery. North Pearl was predominantly Irish, ghetto Irish, who were content to live on handouts in the slums generation after generation, bullying their cringing wives and beating their rebellious kids, while the more ambitious Irish worked their way into the mainstream of America, finding jobs in the first generation and professions in the second. The men of North Pearl lived off of transient WPA jobs and Child Benefit checks. Of Albany's poor, only the Irish ever got those cushy WPA jobs that consisted of leaning on a shovel and looking with judicial interest into a hole that someone else had dug weeks before. This was because the political machine that ran Albany was the O'Conner Gang.

The Irish families on our block had received welfare for so long they had come to consider it a basic civil right, but my mother writhed in shame that circumstances had reduced her to living on public charity. Her! Ruth Lillian LaPointe who, like all the LaPointes, had always worked for everything she got! But she had been buffeted by repeated blows. First her charming, handsome, glib husband deserted her, leaving her to provide for two babies just when the Depression was at its deepest and darkest. Then her father, who had stepped in to help to the best of his limited resources, died in a car crash. Then her always fragile lungs gave out, so that she got ill every time she tried to work, as she stubbornly insisted on doing every Christmas.

Although North Pearl Street was a sump for society's lost, damaged, and incapable, I never felt inferior to anyone else, not even to those lucky kids in the Mickey Rooney movies who lived in small towns with big lawns and Sunday dinners, and had wryly benevolent fathers who remembered that they, too, had been rascals when they were young. I didn't feel inferior because my mother wouldn't let me. Okay, so the chips were down for us at that particular moment; she admitted that. We were going through a rough patch, no denying it. But she made it clear that, unlike our neighbors, my sister and I didn't belong in the slums. And not only did we not belong there, but we weren't going to stay. No, sir! One of these days our ship would come in, and when it did... we'd be out of there in a flash. Boy-o-boy just you watch our smoke!

Between bouts of lung trouble, my mother was energetic, doggedly optimistic, and full of laughter and games; and unlike the haggard, drained mothers of other kids on the block, ours was young and slim and pretty. My sister and I were proud of her, but always a little apprehensive too. Our pride flowed from the fact that this resilient, courageous woman was unfailingly supportive of us, encouraging the slightest glimmer of talent or gift, and assuring us that only a dirty trick of Fate had dumped us into the poverty of Pearl Street, where we didn't belong. (But we'll be out of here just as soon as our ship comes in, you mind my words!) Our apprehension had to do with Mother's hairtrigger temper which flashed out at the least, often imagined, slight to her dignity-an oversensitivity common among those who know their ethnic background is viewed with derision or disfavor and who, in aggressive compensation, feistily boast of those despised roots. Mother boasted about being French-'n'-Indian, the first ethnic strain accounting, in her view, for her refined taste, and the second making her a dangerous person to cross.

One manifestation of my mother's bristly pride was her refusal to accept that, poor though she was, her kids couldn't have what she called a 'decent Christmas', which involved her finding part-time work as a waitress in some cheap restaurant that needed help over the holiday season. She would get back from work late at night, having walked all the way through the cold and slush to save money for our presents, and inevitably her lungs would give out by Christmas morning, which she would spend lying on the living room couch, fevered and coughing, watching my sister and me open presents that were too expensive for our condition of life. Several times she ended up in the hospital with pneumonia, and once she was put into a sanatorium for two months, during which my sister and I were sent to a Catholic orphanage, a grim prisonlike institution set in wintry fields of corn stubble that seemed infinitely bleak to city kids. The first day, a brother took me aside and told me that I should pray every night for my mother's recovery. That night I alternately prayed and cried into my pillow, because it had never occurred to me that she might die, leaving Anne-Marie and me there forever.