I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [106]
During those years, she gave my brother John money to help buy a house on Long Island after he and Mary got married, and my brother Paul, too, when he married his love, Kathleen, and moved to Maine. When Carrie and I, in the early 1960s, tried to buy a town house on Seventy-first Street, no bank would give us a mortgage. Ballet dancers were not considered good investments. Boss gave us some money for the down payment, and Carrie’s parents made up the difference. Gerry Goldsmith, the husband of a dear friend, Barbara, guaranteed the bank he would make good if we defaulted, so we got a mortgage and bought a home.
Carrie’s self-portrait (image credit 11.4)
By that time, Boss had saved a couple of hundred thousand dollars. Her apartment on 163rd Street was empty, and as she aged, she was determined not to burden anyone, so she moved to the west coast of Florida, bought herself a little house, and started a garden. “I always loved it when your father and I lived in Florida. It’s warmer here, and Clearwater is cheaper than New York!”
My father must have been spying on her, because he trailed her to Florida and lived in a cheap rooming house near her. At church on Sundays, he would sit in the pew behind her, grinding his teeth and muttering to the back of her head, “Why are you in church? You’re living in sin, Georgette. God won’t forgive you until you come back to your husband.” She never acknowledged him, looked at him, or acted like she heard him—for seventeen years.
While in Florida, Pop sought private-duty clients, and ended up nursing a celebrity. Bill Stern was a famous radio and television announcer, sports commentator, and emcee of The Colgate Sports Newsreel. He was old, rich, and dying. Pop relished discussing his wealthy client: “He’s a hell of a storyteller, but what did it get him?” and “He’s got a big mansion, a swimming pool, half a dozen cars in his garage, a cook, gardener, chauffeur, a housekeeper, and me. No one swims in his pool; the staff show up, do their work, and leave. The only person he has to talk to is me—when I come by to give him his shots, bathe him, and empty his bedpan!” True to Pop’s mantra—“The underdog is the one to root for … they’re going to end up being the winners!”—his anecdotes ended with his familiar moral: “The biggest celebrity, the richest person in the world, ultimately has to have someone empty the bedpan. It’s the little people in the world, doing things like that, that make it run!”
He spent his falls and winters stalking and tormenting my mother in Florida. In late spring, he would take a bus up to Maine to spend summers with my brother Paul. On the way, he would occasionally stop by our house in New York, unannounced, knock on the door, and say to a harassed Carrie as she opened it, “I’m just passing through and need a place to put my head.”
An excerpt from my diary, May 27, 1973 (I was recovering in the hospital after my first knee surgery): “Carrie said Pop arrived last night. The bell rang, she opened the front door, and he popped out his dentures. ‘I almost fell over,’ she said. Mumbling without his teeth, he announced, ‘All I want is a cup of coffee and the living room couch.’ ”
Pa never stayed more than a day or two—a break in the bus ride—but while in New York he would walk and walk from dawn till night, all over the city, buying and reading newspapers, especially Florida newspapers and the Wall Street Journal. Sometimes at breakfast, I would give him his tea and make him an Egg Trudy sandwich, and I’d watch him sit at the table, industriously making marks and notations on a piece of paper. “What are you doing, Pop?” He would get this look in his eye and reply, “Scheming. I’m scheming.” Turns out he had tracked down which stocks my mother had purchased, and was following their ups and downs.
The Boss found out. I think he wrote her a letter, saying she had to give him half of her income, since they were still married. Boss went to see the local Catholic priest: “What do I do, Father?” The enlightened priest answered, “What? You’ve been