I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [63]
VAUDEVILLE
Pete Petersen, before this bit, a professional entertainer;
He and a partner tossed two girls on the Two-a-Day,
Swung them by their heels and snatched them in mid-air,
Billed as “Pete’s Meteors: Acrobatic Adagio & Classical Ballet.”
His vulnerable grin, efficiency, or bland physique
Lands him in Graves’ Registration, a slot few strive to seek.
He follows death around picking up pieces,
Recovering men and portions of men so that by dawn
Only the landscape bares its wounds, the dead are gone.
Near Echternach, after the last stand they had the heart to make
With much personal slaughter by small arms at close range,
I drive for an officer sent down to look things over.
There is Pete slouched on a stump, catching his wind.
On your feet: salute. “Yes, sir?”
“Bad here, what?” “Yes, sir.”
Good manners or knowing no word can ever condone
What happened, what he had to do, has done,
Spares further grief. Pete sits down.
A shimmering pulsation of exhaustion fixes him
In its throbbing aura like footlights when the curtain rises.
His act is over. Nothing now till the next show.
He takes his break while stagehands move the scenery,
And the performing dogs are led up from below.
Boss Leaves Pop
As members of the NYCB, Ninette and I were earning salaries. Having switched from ballet to Broadway, brother Paul was earning his living in musical theater, while John, now engaged to the lovely Mary Cruthers, was working as an assistant manager at Woolworth’s.
Boss dreamed of becoming a nurse, but without a high school diploma there was no chance, so she attended night school and became a nurse’s aide. “It’s the same as a nurse! I give shots and medications, and do the ministering just like they do, only they don’t have to empty bedpans.”
After the war, Pop had returned to his old job at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and, before the decade was out, found himself replaced by a machine, since hospital management had automated the elevators. Boss became the full-time wage earner. “Andy, become a nurse’s aide like me,” she urged, and enrolled him in the same nursing school she had attended.
My father’s version: “As soon as I finished the course, she threw me out of the house.”
Coming home from rehearsal, I opened the apartment door, and there was Pop, waiting. He immediately launched into a diatribe about my mother, menopause, and madness. “They go crazy!” he cried, as though it was fact that when women go through menopause they lose their minds, ipso facto. “She threw me out! She’s mad, your mother, insane! I went all my life with holes in my pants so that you could have your dancing lessons and your fancy, artsy world. And now your mother is throwing me out! It’s the menopause doing it to her. She’s not in her right mind!”
Frantic and crazy, my father made a pain in the ass of himself, a broken record of unending complaints about his victimization and the madness of the mother. “Do you think it’s rational for a woman whose husband has supported her … ?” The minute my father visited John and his family to unload his grievances, John said, “Don’t talk to me about my mother,” and closed the door. John had his own life; he and his bride, Mary, were living on Long Island, starting a family, and John was working brutal hours at Woolworth’s. Paul had been drafted into the Army and was enduring the rigors of basic training in Fort Hood, Texas, so he was spared Pop’s rants.
Ninette and I bore the brunt. But, because I was the youngest and Boss’s pet, Pop zeroed in on me: “Talk to your mother, she can’t do this to me. It’s your fault.” Imagine as a teenager—my father told me, “We haven’t had sex in years, Jacques!” Hard enough to imagine your parents copulating. The mind balks, images