The boys wore gray canvas uniforms, and we marched in silence to meals, classes, and prayer, our lives punctuated and dictated by clamorous electric bells. We showered in cold water and slept in an unheated cavernous dormitory that was supposed to 'harden us up' against the rigors of life, but it only kept us in a permanent state of drippy noses, sore throats, and ear aches. Discipline was rigid and hierarchical, the older boys being in charge of the younger. This led to bullying and illegal late night beatings with wet towels carried out in the shower room within a ring of older boys.

Anne-Marie and I were separated upon arrival at the orphanage, and she was sent to the girls' wing where, only five years old and having no idea where I was, she cried herself to sleep every night and reverted to bed-wetting, for which she was both ridiculed and punished. She was picked on because she was pretty and vulnerable, and bigger girls yanked her around by her long, blond hair. One afternoon a couple of weeks after we arrived, I was in the tangled mass of boys that ran and hooted and screamed wildly during the pandemonium of our unmonitored recess periods, when I thought I heard Anne-Marie's voice within the chaos. I searched for her among the tight-packed shoal of blue-uniformed girls who used to watch the rampaging boys from their side of the high chain-link fence that separated us, but before I found her the bells rang and we had to run back inside and leave the exercise yard for the girls. I later learned that I had walked right past her while she vainly called my name. I couldn't hear her through the din, and I failed to recognize her because a nun had cropped her hair in an effort to save her from being tormented by envious girls. She cried all that night. But the next day I walked up and down my side of the fence until I found her, and we held fingers through a chain link while she sobbed with a mixture of relief and misery. And that's how we spent the rest of our recess periods until the day we were called into the director's office and told that we were being sent home. Our mother was well again.

It wasn't until we were home that Mother told us how the social workers had decided that she was not in good enough health to be a 'fit mother', and that we kids would remain in custody at the orphanage until we were sixteen, old enough to get jobs. Mother had used the formidable weapon of her furious French-'n'-Indian temper to browbeat the astonished social workers into letting us live together again. But next time...

To avoid there being a next time, whenever Mother had to go to the hospital, Anne-Marie and I did everything we could to conceal the fact that we were at home alone, so the social workers wouldn't send us back to the orphanage. I would wash our clothes in the bathtub, and Anne-Marie would try to keep the house clean, awkwardly wielding a broom twice her height. When I did the shopping at Mr Kane's, I would mention that my mother had told me to get this or that, or that she was feeling just fine, thank you... anything to deceive any welfare spies that might be lurking around.

My sister and I came to dread the approach of Christmas. Mother never seemed to realize how frightened we were that our fragile family would be broken up again, and permanently this time, all because of her hard-headed determination to give us 'Christmas presents every bit as nice as those rich kids get, come Helen Highwater!'

For years I thought of Helen Highwater as some sort of avenging she-devil who descended upon people who were trying to get things done. You see, my mother had a flawed ear for idioms and adages, which she often twisted around, like accusing someone or something of being 'dull as dishwater', or her life-long assumption that the 'hoi polloi' were the snobbish upper crust of society. When she said the word she always used to push the tip of her nose up with her finger to illustrate the snootiness of the hoi polloi. I suspect that she was sustained in this error by the similarity between 'hoi polloi' and 'hoity-toity'.

The welfare agency gave us $7.27 a week, and through careful buying, extreme self-denial, and great imagination in the planning of meals, my mother managed to feed and clothe us on what worked out to a little less than thirty-five cents per person per day. The welfare paid our rent directly to our faceless slum landlord instead of giving us the money and letting us find our own accommodations. They paid much more for our three-room apartment than people with money in hand would have been asked, but then as now the Lords of Poverty didn't trust the poor not to squander or drink up their money.

So the welfare system gave us basic shelter and food, but we were on our own when it came to those little extras that made life more than a daily grind of survival: birthday and Christmas presents, or going to the movies once a month, or buying my sister a nice dress 'once in a blue noon' to give a little variety to her wardrobe of ill-fitting hand-me-downs provided by the nuns at Saint Joseph's Convent, or buying a pound of the coffee that was my mother's only hedonistic vice (just two cups a day), or for the special holiday celebrations she used to make for us, like our long-awaited and much-appreciated Easter treat of 'Virginia Baked Ham' that she confected from two cans of Spam, a can of pineapple and a small bottle of maple syrup. Mother used to shape and score the Spam and arrange the rings of pineapple, then bake it so that it looked exactly like a miniature glazed ham, and we used to have yams with margarine and maple syrup, which was cheaper than sugar in those days because Vermont sugarbush owners were suffering badly from the Depression. It was my job to color the margarine, putting the white block of grease into a bowl, then sprinkling the orange coloring powder over it and mixing it in with a fork until it looked like butter... though it still smelled like grease. It would not be until the war came along and absorbed all the produce of America's Dairyland that the powerful butter lobby allowed precolored margarine onto the market.

These little life-enhancing pleasures could not be had on thirty-five cents a day per person, so extra money had to be made either by my mother or by me, shining shoes or running errands. And sometimes we just had to do without. But even when things seemed their grimmest, Mother used to assure my sister and me that one of these days our ship would come in and carry us far, far away from the slums to some Easy Street out West where we'd never again know the helplessness and hopelessness that is the worst part of poverty. When I was little, I envisioned Mother's metaphorical ship pulling in at one of the Hudson River piers, and my mother and sister and I would walk up the gangplank, and never look back. But one night we were sitting at the kitchen table and Mother was dreamily describing the splendid house we would live in one of these days, when I became rich and famous... and with a shock of ice at the pit of my stomach I suddenly realized that Iwas the ship my mother was waiting for, and it was mytask in life to rescue us from Pearl Street. The weight of responsibility was staggering, and it was soon after this recognition that I began to lose myself in my story games.

Evening came as I sat on our stoop, thinking about the day we arrived in Albany with our boxes of stuff and our bits of battered furniture standing on the pavement for everyone to see. I got up from the dirty step that left a gritty mottle on the backs of my bare legs and went in. As I passed through our kitchen I dropped the nickel Mrs McGivney had given me into our Dream Bank, which was an empty box of Diamond kitchen matches we hid on the shelf under the real box of matches to baffle any thief who might come snooping around. The Dream Bank was money saved up from Mother's occasional part-time jobs and from my rounds of the bars and taverns downtown on Friday nights, carrying my hand-made shoeshine box on my shoulder and asking men if they wanted a shine (black and brown polish only, no two-tone shoes), which only the occasional drunk or some guy trying to impress a woman ever wanted, although sometimes they'd give me a nickel or even a dime to get rid of me. Like selling apples on the street corner, shining shoes during the Depression was a way of begging without total loss of dignity. The Dream Bank was supposed to be for special things that would bring color into our lives... we bought our second-hand Emerson radio with the cracked Bakelite case from it, paying twenty-five cents a week for over a year... but more often than not, it got emptied out for dull, soon-forgotten things, like food or clothes.