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 forming blank out. “We’ve been sleeping in the same bed, but for the last ten years, she hasn’t let me touch her!”
When I accused Boss of throwing Pop out, she replied, “It’s between your father and me. I don’t talk about it.”
My father wrote letters to all Boss’s relatives in Lewiston, Maine, and demanded a hearing. Then he went up to Maine and filled the ear of anyone who would listen with his message, “Georgette’s gone crazy. She’s insane.” He was persuasive, and convinced my aunts—Boss’s sisters—to hold a tribunal. With letters and phone calls, the aunts summoned my mother and me to Maine. (Ninette extricated herself from the tornado. She was hot and heavy with Dr. Mel Kiddon.)
In Maine, I was interviewed by each of the aunts about my father and mother’s relationship, and to my shame, I parroted my father’s statements, “She must be crazy. Menopause, you know. It makes women crazy!” (Diagnosis from a seventeen-year-old.) Boss stuck out her chin and told her sisters, “Mind your own business. It’s my marriage.” Balanced against my father’s ranting and raving, her confidence was unshakable and her reasoning true. “Vas y!” the tribunal told my father, and the whole chimera collapsed.
My mother never said a word in defense of herself for leaving my father. She’d clench her jaw, put her nose in the air (the “Napoleon” stance), and say, “I’m not divorcing him. We just can’t live together.” She did divorce him, eventually, but it took a while.
Pop, in New York, rented a room in a boardinghouse near our block. He went back to Columbia Presbyterian. Now he spent his eight-hour shift (never a minute more) going up and down the newly automated elevator, this time as a nurse’s aide. When he wasn’t working, he walked all over the city, from Washington Heights to the Battery, sometimes circumnavigating the whole of Manhattan Island. He bought newspapers, smoked his cigars, ate and read alone at various workmen’s cafeterias.
Boss sought out “private-duty” clients, with sleepover duty. I was rarely home, leaving at eight o’clock in the morning for class and rehearsals, returning at midnight after performances, raiding the icebox for whatever Boss may have left. I was breaking out on my own, earning a salary, and falling in love with a ballerina, Carolyn George.