I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [11]
New York is an intimidating, expensive city; we crowded into a few rooms in an awful apartment shared with cockroaches. In the morning, they were using our toothbrushes before us! Pop couldn’t get a job for love or money and walked the streets trying to find one. Boss managed to feed and care for us as she watched our meager savings drip away. When Pop came home and sat down, she would harp, “Go out and see if you can find some work. Around here, you’re good for nothing!”
When he was not around, she never complained about him to us. “Your father is working hard. Your father’s a good man.” On the other hand, he always complained about her to us: “Your mother will never be satisfied. She always wants more! She’s crazy and she’ll drive us all crazy.” I believe he loved her deeply, but he chose to play the patient and long-suffering receiver of abuse. For a man who took such pride in work, being unemployed and having to endure a wife who berated him brought him to the edge. Finally, in 1939, we were evicted, deposited on the sidewalk with our baggage. No car, no luck, and no apartment, we found ourselves homeless in New York City. I was five, Madeleine close to eight, Pat was ten, John, thirteen.
The nuns in a convent just off Washington Square Park gave us shelter. My sister and I slept on army cots in the cellar, straddling the furnace. The cellar door led out to a back alley and a metal fire escape led up one flight to a back-door entrance to the convent. My mother and father, with my two brothers, must have slept upstairs.
My cot stage right, my sister’s stage left, the furnace up front center (image credit 1.8)
Our homelessness didn’t last too long, a couple of summer months. Then things brightened—a position opened up on Wall Street for a telegraph operator, my father got the job, and we were out of the basement and into the sunlight, out of Manhattan and across the bay to Staten Island, where housing was cheaper and the Boss could have another garden.
Staten Island is divided by a railroad line that runs through its center like a spine. The terminal at its head is in a town called St. George. Its tail, the end of the line, is in the town of Tottenville. We ended up there, renting a tiny two-story clapboard house. To get to work, my father had a long commute. Mornings, he trained it up the spine to St. George, then took the ferry across to Manhattan’s Wall Street. Nights, the reverse. It was some two hours each way.
A boisterous five-year-old, I loved Staten Island, a place of farmlands and forests, marshlands and beaches. Near Tottenville, there was a creek that was a feeder to the bay. Its waters were full of killies (tadpoles) that I would capture and use as bait for fishing. I’d put a bit of bread in a glass jar and half submerge it sideways in the waters at the edge of the creek. When enough killies went for the bread and collected in the jar, I’d capture them by quickly lifting the jar. The creek ran parallel to the railroad tracks, flanked by unkempt hedges of honeysuckle. That’s where I used to go to meet my first love. She was towheaded, tan, barefoot, and wearing a dress of delicate, pale pastels. I think she was four. I would run there and wait till she would wander down, or sometimes, she’d be there waiting for me. We would stand and stare at each other. I never said a word; neither did she. We just stared. She would watch me as I went to get the killies in the bottle, and then we would stare some more. Why is it called puppy love? I dreamed of her constantly. Dante had his Beatrice; I had mine.
Our five-room house had a backyard that opened into a wooded area, wild and overgrown. Some three hundred yards through those woods, hay-covered fields opened up and a dirt path sloped through it, past an old, collapsing barn whose giant doors gaped open on rusty hinges. It was Sunday afternoon after Mass, and I was on my way down the dirt path, following the sound of voices in the distance. My brothers, John and Pat, with their buddies, were playing football