I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [12]
Fled—to my brothers—and blurted out about the Big Red Thing. In seconds, John and his whole football team dashed to the barn. The man was gone. I felt guilty and embarrassed, as if I’d done something wrong, and silently said prayers of thanks that he had escaped a beating, imagining what my brother and his gang would have done had they found him.
Still, in my memory, Staten Island was idyllic. My sister whispered ghost stories in the dark from her bed in the room we shared. Fabulous thunderstorms barreled through, punctuated by stunning cracks of lightning. I used to sit on the floor with my feet stuck out of the kitchen door, soaking them in the pouring rain, and marvel at the ferocity of storms. Inside the doorway, the dry part of me would be slurping the most delicious beefsteak tomatoes, their red juices dripping down my chin. While Boss cooked supper, I played with pots and pans in a makeshift tent she had constructed with sheets draped over the kitchen table. After dinner, when Boss finished cleaning up, she would reverse the oilcloth that covered the table to reveal an elaborate, colorful game map she’d drawn on the underside. It was her invention, a version of Monopoly before the game existed. Rolling dice, we played with varied colored buttons for pieces. Our recreation was the radio, and the Boss’s game.
When I was six, she enrolled my sister, Madeleine, in ballet classes, supposedly for her health, as she had almost died from a bout of typhus fever that year. Boss had sniffed out a Miss Jones, who taught dance in St. George, and every Saturday we would take the train, me in the front car gazing out the rounded window and dreaming of how thrilling my father’s commute must be. It was over an hour from Tottenville to St. George, one way. Lucky Pop got to do this every morning! Plus, the ferry ride to Wall Street! Then the whole thing back again at night!
While my sister was doing her pliés, the Boss would seize the opportunity to go shopping in the Big City of St. George. A ball of restless energy, she ran from one shop to the other, dragging me along, looking for bargains. A buzzing blender of thrift and industry, she made and sold hats and clothes for other people, did their laundry for a fee—and socked away the cash. By the end of two years of steady work and careful saving, we had a nest egg and even had wheels—a secondhand car—a Studebaker.
Old Joe Kennedy had been several years ahead of Wall Street, but the big firms caught up and phased out their telegraph operators. Uh-oh. Out of work again. Poor Pop!
Boss saw the whole thing as an opportunity. We would move “back to Manhattan, where the arts are.”
So, “Goodbye clapboard house and Tottenville, hello again, Manhattan!”
We packed up, took the ferry in, and settled in a grungy, tiny apartment in Washington Heights. My father sought any kind of employment. He repaired watches for a while, even picked up work as a gravedigger—but there was never enough money. Our funds depleted, we sold the Studebaker. My sister and I enrolled at the nearest Catholic school—Incarnation, on 175th Street. The nuns had a punishment for disruptive boys: “Take your books and go sit with the girls on their side of the room!”—it was meant to humiliate the boys. I loved it! The girls were nicer, smarter, and passed me the answers