I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [16]
Across the street from the museum plaza complex, Jimmy and I had a secret hangout—the Episcopal Church of the Intercession’s graveyard, an old, nineteenth-century City of the Dead, whose narrow streets we walked, peering into tombs filled with coffin niches and mausoleums, some of whose doors had broken down with age, others sealed with concrete. Names of Civil War heroes and officers are chiseled in stone. John Jacob Astor and his family are sleeping there, as are Audubon, and Clement Clarke Moore, who wrote “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” It is Manhattan’s version of London’s Highgate Cemetery. Our cemetery was intersected by Broadway, dividing it into two halves. The best was the west part. It was the spookiest, eerie even in sunlight, but thrilling in the rain. We would don our Bulldog Drummond raincoats, and, parroting the opening lines of the popular radio hero, intone, “Out of the fog and into the night walked Bulldog Drummond,” then enter an open mausoleum, slouch on the ground in what we imagined was bone dust, and tell each other ghost stories.
CROSSING AMSTERDAM
In our apartment house on the sixth floor lived an Irish American family, the Sullivans. They all shared the same pale skin, susceptible to sunburn and freckles. The father and mother were big and boisterous, and I felt that their slaps on the back and hearty good wishes to everyone camouflaged a hidden frustration. They smelled of alcohol, made me uncomfortable, and I avoided them whenever possible. The family included a slew of boys—at least three—and a sweet, little grandmother, who we called Old Mrs. Sullivan. She was frail, and years of labor had bent her into the shape of a question mark.
Old Mrs. Sullivan may have been in her sixties, but stooped, with white hair and wrinkles, she looked at least a hundred—Methuselah’s wife. She wore cheap-looking flowered housedresses that hung at odds with the torqued shape of her body. She rolled her nylon stockings down, making doughnuts around her ankles. Her shins were covered with ulcerated, running sores and anything touching them must have caused agony. In the elevator, on the street, or in the stairwell, she was always struggling with grocery bags. Those Sullivans ate a lot. Quite often, when the elevator went on the blink, she dragged those bags up all six flights. I imagined she did all the shopping, cooking, and housecleaning for those voracious boys. Slave labor at the Sullivans’.
My mother never missed an opportunity to couple sympathy for Old Mrs. Sullivan’s labors with a moral lesson for me: “Jacques, don’t you be like those boys. They never lift a finger to help their poor grandmother. She’s a saint, working for them day and night. They’re all lazy good-for-nothings.”
The front windows of our apartment looked out on 163rd Street. How I loved to play the wild games of the street. Ranging the entire length of the block, I would lead my gang, leaping up and down stoops, dodging and twisting in rough play, howling with laughter and glee, with much ripping of shirts and clothes. If harnessed, the energy we expended in our play could have kept the lights on all night in every building on the block.
Early evenings in the midst of our horseplay, an explosive sound would freeze me. “Jacques, Jacques!” It was the Boss, leaning out of our fourth-floor window and waving at me. She was the shortest mother on the block, and the loudest.
“Geezus, fellas, it’s my mother.” I would yell up to her, “Boss, can’t I play more?” Like a blast from a trumpet, her answer would come. “No! Come up for supper now.” And I would dash off. “Gotta go. See you later, fellas.”
Summoned by the Boss, one day I careened around the corner and—whoops!—almost collided with Old Mrs. Sullivan. She was staggering, weaving as she struggled to carry about six or eight bottles of milk packed into a pair of shopping bags. In those days, milk came