American Rose

by Karen Abbott

  “Do you think anything’s broken?” he managed to ask. No one could say. Morton and Herbert carried him to his car, lowering him like a sleeping child into the backseat. Mary heard the car pull up and met her husband at the door, wondering why he was home so early. She summoned a doctor for an emergency house call. No broken bones, he said, just a “pulled muscle” in the leg and “probably a bruise” on the shoulder. He gave Billy a sedative and ordered him to lie flat.

  Billy obeyed until the sun seared through the window and poked him awake. He hopped to the car on one leg and drove himself back to Manhattan in time for rehearsals at the Republic. He scavenged through the prop room until he found a cane, and hobbled about on that until it became tiresome. He developed a lurching Quasimodo walk, stomp drag stomp drag, that folded him into half of his already Lilliputian size. The leg he could handle, but it felt like someone had exploded a bomb inside his shoulder. He told himself it would go away if he ignored it long enough.

  Colloquially known as the “Tweed Courthouse,” owing to Boss Tweed’s embezzlement of large sums of money during its construction, the building at 52 Chambers Street was one of Manhattan’s most majestic structures, with Corinthian pillars that bowed into graceful archways and an octagonal rotunda awash in brilliant sheaths of light. Judge Samuel Seabury appreciated the irony of trying the Walker administration—the last in the old Tammany Hall tradition, if he handled the case properly—in a venue named for its most notorious and reviled leader.

  Serious implications aside, the corruption trial was improbably entertaining—so much so that portions of testimony would inspire the Pulitzer Prize–winning 1959 Broadway musical Fiorello! Take, for instance, Seabury’s questioning of a New York County sheriff and member of Tammany Hall who had somehow managed to accumulate nearly a half-million dollars in six years on an annual salary of $8,500:

  Q: Where did you keep these moneys that you had saved?

  A: In a safe-deposit box at home in the house.

  Q: Whereabouts at home in the house did you keep this money that you had saved?

  A: In the safe.

  Q: In a safe?

  A: Yes.

  Q: In a little box in a safe?

  A: A big safe.

  Q: But a little box in a big safe?

  A: In a big box in a big safe.

  Q: Giving you the benefit of every doubt on sums from your official vocation and other gainful pursuits, the $83,000 extra you deposited in 1929 came from the same source that the other money came from?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Same tin box, is that right?

  A: That is right.

  Q: Now, in 1930, where did the extra cash come from, Sheriff?

  A: Well, that came from the good box I had. [Laughter]

  Q: Kind of a magic box.

  A: It was a wonderful box.

  Q: A wonderful box. [Laughter] What did you have to do—rub the lock with a little gold, and open it in order to find more money?

  A: I wish I could.

  Ten days later, the mayor arrived at the Tweed Courthouse, his haberdashery impeccably, if ostentatiously, coordinated: shirt, tie, pocket handkerchief, socks, one-button, double-breasted suit, and the stone in his pinky ring all complementary shades of blue. Five thousand spectators lunged to touch the sleeve of his coat, strained to see him wink beneath the cerulean brim of his fedora. Some wore shirts with beer for prosperity stitched across the front, and they hiccupped and belched in between shouts of “Atta boy, Jimmy!” and “You tell ’em, Jimmy!” A dozen women stationed by the entrance doused him with fresh rose petals, and swooned when he disappeared behind the door.

  One week after the fall Billy’s condition had worsened. He could hobble on his leg but his shoulder was a throbbing knot of pain. It hurt just to turn over in bed. No one could even guess at the cause; surely any injuries sustained from his fall should have been healed by now. He worried about the theaters and got angry whenever Morton or Herbert appeared at his bedside. “Who’s minding the store, brothers?” he asked, and ordered them to get back to work.

  The West Side Court, on 54th Street near Ninth Avenue, was a dour, plain block of a building, as dingy as the Tweed Courthouse was stunning. Morton and Herbert arrived for their hearing indignant and angry, tired of John Sumner’s class-based rhetoric, the accusation that the Minskys catered to perverts and degenerates indigenous to the Lower East Side, the implication that the brothers were no better themselves. They listened to a stream of government witnesses natter on senselessly. The secretary of Franklin Savings Bank insisted that he would not recommend a loan on any parcel of real estate near Minsky’s Republic. A prominent rabbi condemned “the commercialization of filth and sex depravity by Jews” (a comment that made Morton long to retort, out loud, “Presumably by a goy it was okay”).

  The commissioner decided he would return their license on one condition: stripteasers would have to wear brassieres—an absurd, untenable mandate, the Minskys knew, in both letter and spirit. A girl and her audience existed together alone, negotiating and compromising, both pretending to offer more than they claimed.

  How surreal, how ironically and cruelly odd, for Billy to be onstage like this—the performer for once, under scrutiny and awaiting judgment. Morton wondered if his brother sensed the heat of staring eyes, the rush of focused light. They kept their voices soft now, tepid and receding, and no longer spoke words Billy refused to hear. Paget’s disease, the doctors said, a bone malignancy for which there was no cure, but no one quite understood the how or why or when; perhaps it had lain dormant inside his body and been rattled to life by his fall. Morton studied what was left of his brother, imagined what Billy felt: the illness trudging with bleak purpose across the map of his small body, detouring to command every inch, until his body collapsed inside him and pain was all that was left.

  Billy turned in his bed to look at each one of them, matching dulcet, blurry words with faces—father Louis, wife Mary, son Irving, brother Herbert—and then settling, finally, on Morton. There was an empty chair where Abe, the first and once Billy’s best brother, should have been. Billy hated empty seats more than anything else in the world; they inserted absence into the fullest experience, marred the symmetry of the flawless. For the first time in his life Billy couldn’t tell what the audience wanted, comedy or tragedy, and because he was Billy and because he was a pro, he decided to give them both.

  “Never work north of Fourteenth Street, right, Papa?” he asked, and somehow his shrunken gargle of a voice carried to all of their ears. They smiled at him, and Morton prepared himself to watch the final act. Their words grew duller around Billy, flat and blunted around the edges, compressed into one listless, monotonous drone. Quiet crept in, stealthy, taking its time, turning down the volume and unfurling the curtain, lowering it by inches, until the velvet hem teased the floor and the darkness seized his eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  I am going to give you back to God, Louise, for him to manage you. He will untangle this whole unhappy affair. In the meantime, I am going to know that you will and must love me. Because Louise, without me you are lost, dear. I will always be waiting for you to come to me.

  — ROSE THOMPSON HOVICK

  New York City and Nyack, New York, Winter 1953–1954

  Rose Hovick’s deterioration from cancer begins almost imperceptibly, as if her body wants to confront, stage by stage, the thing that dares to kill it. One pound at a time her figure whittles away, the tissue-paper skin of her face fuses to bone, her eyes exchange their quick, bold cunning for fear and rage—the former difficult for her to convey, the latter impossible to suppress.

  Her fierce energy burns a shade dimmer, nearly extinguished, and flares again without warning. “Who is paying for that woman out there?” she whisper-screams, eyeing her nurse. “Gypsy! I don’t need to pay anyone for living in my house, eating my food, and drinking my beer. Taking advantage because I’m down—well, I’m not that down!” That nurse quits and Gypsy f
inds another, an older woman who shuts off her hearing aid when Rose’s voice booms. One night, while tucking her patient into bed, the nurse hears a feeble plea: “Closer, please.” She leans forward. Rose slams a metal water pitcher against her face with such force she dislodges the nurse’s bridgework.

  Rose Thompson Hovick’s unmarked grave, Oak Hill Cemetery, Nyack, New York. (photo credit 29.1)

  Dealing with Mother is another full-time job, one that doesn’t pay. Gypsy can’t eat. Sleep is elusive. Her stomach feels like a clenched fist; it is just a matter of time before her ulcer lights a fire in her core. In lucid moments Mother toys with her and June, sending them on scavenger hunts in the backyard storage shed, knowing full well what they’ll find: a dozen radios, eight television sets, boxes of electric blankets, shopping bags overflowing with watches, rings, underwear, fur coats—artifacts from a lifetime spent bilking them both. Rose Hovick is now sixty-two, but for Gypsy the whole ordeal is like having another child, and ten-year-old Erik causes trouble enough. He’s been stealing money from her purse since he turned five, $25 here and there, running up charges in neighborhood stores. It’s been sixteen years since Gypsy started communicating with Mother through a lawyer—off and on, anyway—and she has done her best to keep Rose away from Erik, from seeping into him. She succeeded for a long time, but Mother found her ways, as she always did, like the afternoon she appeared at the front door of the house on 63rd Street.

  Erik was five at the time, a precocious little boy wearing short pants and cowboy boots, and it was his job to greet company. He looked up to see an unfamiliar woman in a ruffled dress, with dark, curly hair sheared close to her head. She had a clown’s smile, overbright and vaguely menacing, wide enough to show every perfect white tooth. She bent down to his level.

  “Is your mother home?” she asked.

  “Whom shall I say is calling?”

  “Tell her it’s her mother.”

  Erik knew the house rule: if you don’t know a visitor, ask her to wait outside. But this was an exception, Erik thought, his mother’s mother, and he swung open the door. The woman stepped inside, and Erik scuttled up the stairs to find Gypsy.

  “Your mother’s downstairs,” he said, “and would like to see you.”

  Gypsy looked up from her work. She was preparing for her Royal American Show, the largest traveling carnival of the day, a grueling but lucrative thirty-nine weeks. The company provided the tent and the carneys, she provided the entertainment, and her husband, Julio, had designed a “peep show”—a secondary act titled “What Are Your Dreams?” featuring nearly naked women posing in still-life tableaus—an homage, with Freudian underpinnings, to the Ziegfeld Follies and Minsky’s interpretation thereof.

  “Did you let her in the house?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She should handle it, she knew, but she didn’t have the time. Besides, Erik had to learn to deal with people like Mother if he were going to rule the world.

  “For god’s sake,” Gypsy said, and sighed. “Hurry up and make sure she hasn’t clipped the Picasso.”

  He ran downstairs and found his grandmother in the foyer.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but my mother’s very busy right now and she can’t see you.”

  He waited for her to leave, but instead she sat down on the sofa and patted the spot next to her.

  “Sit down and talk to me,” she said. “You must be Erik.”

  He sat and she leaned in closer, whispered into his ear.

  “I bet you like guns, don’t you?”

  She opened her purse and pulled out a Colt .45. She placed the gun in his hands, so heavy he could barely lift it. It took all his strength to climb back upstairs to show his mother his prize, only to have her confiscate it immediately. That particular gun hadn’t killed anyone in their past, but Gypsy understood the meaning behind the gesture, felt the panic of that time lodge deeper inside her memory. Mother loved to remind her of what they once had been, both alone and together.

  Now, five years later, Gypsy can’t believe their sick, sweet game is nearing its final play. She admits Rose to a place called Tender Elms, paying for ten days in advance. “So very elegant,” Gypsy notes in her diary. “Expensive but wonderful.” She dares to think the matter settled, but two weeks later, after dinner at June’s house, she learns Mother went on a rampage and is no longer welcome at Tender Elms. It takes two full days to find another home that will accept her. “I hope this is for the good of all concerned,” Gypsy writes, “but I know there is more to come.”

  And so there is. One day the phone rings and Erik picks up, answering “Miss Lee’s residence,” just as he’s been taught. “Who may I say is calling?”

  He listens.

  “It’s your mother’s nurse,” Erik calls up the stairs to Gypsy.

  “I can’t be bothered,” Gypsy answers.

  “My mother is busy right now,” Erik reports.

  “Tell her her mother is dying.”

  Erik relays the message.

  “My mother is always dying,” Gypsy says.

  “Tell her it’s real this time,” the nurse replies, and Erik does.

  The remainder of Gypsy’s 1953 diary is sparse and quotidian—hairdresser appointments, bill tallies for food and cigarettes, an interview for American Weekly—and then the notations stop altogether, until the last week of the first month of the new year. The entry for January 28 reads, simply, “Mother died at 6:30.”

  She does not write what came before, how Mother got her final wish, the one they’d denied her for years: the three of them together again in one room, close as they could be. June stands at the window. Outside a light snow falls, frost speckling the glass, the only movement among them for a long time. Gypsy sits at the foot of Mother’s bed, watching her breathe, the timid sinking and swelling of her chest. She has braced herself for this, practiced her stance and stoic face, her posture of defense. The violet eyes flip open, and Mother pulls herself up on her elbows, grunting with the effort, veins twitching, tiny exposed wires beneath translucent skin. She shimmies toward the end of the bed, toward Gypsy, her breath now coming in dry rasps. “I know about you,” she says, a catch between the words, making each stand on its own. “Greedy, selfish! You want me to die. I’m the only one who knows all about you.”

  One mottled leg slides from the mattress, hangs limply over the side. Her nightgown gapes open. Her old suede grouch bag, still strung around her waist after all these years, now dangles next to a colostomy bag. The sight brings to mind Gypsy’s favorite piece of family lore, the great-great-grandmother and her sash of “horsemeat,” waiting for everyone around her to die. Rose clutches at the money bag and teeters, losing her balance.

  “You’ll fall,” Gypsy says and reaches to steady her.

  “No! You can’t have anything back! Just because I’m letting go—it’s mine! My house, my jewelry …” Her body sways from the force of her voice. Gypsy tries to lower her gently, as if putting her down for a nap. Rose grips her daughter’s forearm and kicks beneath her, torso writhing, spittle collecting in the corners of her mouth. There is a sudden shift in power, and Rose twists and heaves herself upward. Gypsy lets her body wilt, allows her mother to take the lead. Gypsy lies on her back now, the headboard knocking hard against the curve of her skull, swatches of her hair captured in Rose’s fists. For the first time she turns toward June, who has been watching, wordlessly and utterly still. Now June rushes at her.

  “No,” Gypsy says, and means it. “Don’t. No.”

  June had her showdown with Mother twenty-five years ago. It is Gypsy’s turn now, at long last.

  For several moments mother and daughter lie together, perfectly aligned, symmetrical, limbs twining, eye to eye, chest against chest, breath blowing hot on skin, addressing each other in a language only they understand. She owes Mother one last moment like this, when no one else clamors for attention or even exists, when the person Gypsy loved first—unconditionally, without knowing the con
sequences—is the one she still loves best. She damaged this woman back when she was young, when the original Ellen June, weighing in at twelve pounds but without an ounce of talent, left her body and the one became two. That was forty-three years ago, and now it is Mother’s turn as much as it is hers.

  When Rose speaks this time, her cadence is steady, a soft, unbroken moan.

  “You’ll never forget,” she says, “how I’m holding you right this minute, Louise, holding you as strongly as I can, wishing with all my heart I could take you all the way with me—all the way down!”

  Gypsy doesn’t move. She waits, and waits, until the bony fingers uncoil from her hair and the breath stops tickling her cheek, until their bodies separate for the very last time. The violet eyes close again, stripping Mother’s face of any color or life. She seems to relax, then, sinking into herself, the foundation of an old house settling. Another stretch of quiet, and Rose Hovick hisses the last words Gypsy will hear her say:

  “This isn’t the end. Wherever you go, as long as either of you lives, I’ll be right there.… So go on, Louise, tell all your classy friends how funny I was, how much smarter you were than me. When you get your own private kick in the ass, just remember: it’s a present from me to you.”

  Gypsy and one of Rose’s neighbors are the only ones to attend her funeral Mass, held at St. Ann’s Catholic Church in Nyack, New York. After the service, Gypsy tucks a few dollars into the collection box and slips quietly out the door. Neither she nor June attends the burial at Oak Hill Cemetery, where Rose is laid to rest without any marker bearing her name.

  Chapter Thirty

  H. L. Mencken called me an ecdysiast. I have also been described as deciduous. The French call me a déshabilleuse. In less-refined circles I’m known as a strip teaser.

  — GYPSY ROSE LEE