I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [23]
Triumphant, Boss arranged for Madeleine to have a lesson once a week and promised to pay the seven dollars and fifty cents after each lesson. Then, as we were leaving, she turned back to deliver the coup de grâce: “Oh, do you mind if Madeleine’s little brother, Jacques, sits on the edge of the bench to learn along with his sister?” Poor Mr. Yon! He must have been so intrigued by her brashness and willpower—or completely numbed by her persistence. Without a whimper, he acquiesced.
A week later, we had our first lesson. We barely touched the piano; instead he taught us how to conduct 2/4, 4/4, 3/4, and 5/4 time, and how to write time signatures on a musical staff. When the lesson was over, my mother, who had sat in the living room beaming throughout, announced, “Dear Mr. Yon, I did not bring your fee with me, but I will bring it first thing in the morning.” The week before, she had saved up about ten dollars, making hats and selling them on street corners. At home, she put seven dollars and fifty cents in an envelope, and with her remaining two dollars and fifty cents she bought a chicken, stuffed it with chestnuts, made a sauce to go with it, and garnished and wrapped it beautifully. The next morning, she left the envelope with the money and the chicken on his doorstep with the following note: “I have worked all week to get the money for these lessons, and next week will have to work just as hard again to get the money for your big fee. I hope you like the chicken.”
Next week, when our second lesson came to a close, the Boss produced an envelope, heavy with coins, and proceeded to count them out on the piano, laboriously stacking quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies—seven dollars and fifty cents. After watching this woman do her act, Mr. Yon scraped the coins back into the envelope, bowed, and, handing it back to my mother, pronounced elegantly, “Madame, forget the fee, but please, keep me in chickens.”
Mr. Yon was fattened, not just with chickens but with stuffed flank steaks, crown roasts, marinated fish, pâtés, and pies. She even left him a bottle of homemade wine. Awful.
Pop managed to get a secondhand—out-of-tune—upright piano for our apartment, and Boss insisted that my sister and I spend at least twenty minutes to a half hour every night practicing.
Boss could be so charming—her English, with heaping spoonfuls of French Canadian accent, could disarm anyone. She believed without question that she was right, and that the process of striving was its own reward; if she didn’t sell a hat, the fact that she had worked so hard to make such a beautiful object was enough in itself. If things did not work out for her, it was not because she held back one iota of effort.
She tried to get Komisarjevsky to forfeit his fees, but lost that bout, so our acting lessons terminated within the year. The piano lessons continued for three years.
I think it was late spring of 1943 that I did Puck … Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese December 7, 1941. During the war, my father worked in a factory that made ball bearings for gyroscopes at Sperry Works. My mother busied herself hanging black shades on all the windows—to hide any luminosity from airplanes flying over—and teaching us to close them when we heard air raid signals. We were instructed to find a place in the house structurally sound (usually a doorframe), stand in it, and wait. Don’t light candles, in case the building gets hit by a bomb—a still-flickering candle flame could start a conflagration. In the streets, we all collected tinfoil from discarded cigarette packs along the sidewalk curbs and in trash bins to donate at collection sites—the bits of tinfoil, released from airplanes, deflected enemy