So Long, Little Egypt

Billy and I moved to the country on the day JFK was shot. He was our hero, we were New Frontiersmen. Just old enough to vote for him, we’d stayed up all night rocking the baby and watching the election returns with Walter Cronkite, Billy booing the screen because my home state was the last to come in. We were happy then. There’s an ancient Chinese curse that warns, “May you live in interesting times.” We knew the times were interesting, we just hadn’t known we were cursed.

Billy was a New York City boy to the bone, but after the second child was born he agreed with me that we needed a change - a greener place, a quieter life. Many of our more liberal friends talked of emigrating to New Zealand, but Billy had a patriotic soul in spite of worshipping Karl Marx, so we joined a steady stream of music-business folk who were moving upriver.

But then the assassination spoiled the move, our lives, and our happiness. Billy drank and I cried for three days. Friends came and went, slept and ate, eyes glued to the television. One couple up and left for Texas, another spoke of plots involving UFO's. Mother called to say that the president had been killed because of his religion; as a child she’d been told that Catholics had tails, and many people still believed them to be imps of Satan. It was the end of the world. Did we eat Thanksgiving dinner that year? I never can remember. All I know is that we came to this fairy-tale place on the day Camelot came to an end.

“There’s something odd about those turned-around E’s,” Mother told me after analyzing Billy’s handwriting with the help of a mail-order course she'd taken. “And he’s crazy,” she’d said, after he kept her up all night talking when I first introduced them. “You ought to get him a little red soap box and set it up in Central Park,” she went on, referring to the political ranting and raving that started in the morning, after he'd read the headlines, and went on for as long as he could find an ear. Then she giggled. She was glad, she said, that Daddy hadn’t heard him call Republicans “those fat cats with their soft couches and cushy jobs.” So was I. FDR was the only man my father hated as much as John L. Lewis, and he’d been hurt when I voted the Democratic ticket. But I’d been dazzled by the dashing Mr. Kennedy, and when Billy took me to hear Fidel Castro speak at the bandstand in Central Park, I’d toyed with the idea of moving even further to the left. I hadn't even been ashamed, as Daddy had, that the new president had designated the southern part of our state a “depressed area” because, before that, it hadn't been designated anything at all and most people didn't know it existed: “Where are you from?” I was always being asked.

“And his language!” Mother had gasped. “I’m not used to hearing that word spoken!”

Until I met Billy, I hadn’t been either. But he’d called me “fucking-sweet,” because I blushed when he asked if I “balled.” And considering how much he resembled my handsome dark-haired father - whom I’d always had a crush on - I thought it was the cutest thing I’d ever heard.

“You’re not serious about him, are you Anne?” asked Mother. “How will you handle him? With kid gloves or a whip and a chair?”

“Handling men” was a religion with Mother, and though I’d been raised on it, I never really got the hang of it. But I knew what she meant about Billy. On our first date he invited me to try his cooking, and I’d walked across the park after work to his West Side apartment, stopping at Peck&Peck to buy a little black sack-dress I’d seen in the window.

Billy had learned his way around a kitchen, he said, from the Irish and Italian women in the neighborhood who took care of the Kane children after their actor-father had died, their mother had gone to work, and Billy's eight-year old stomach had begun to bleed. “I was a lonely little kid with nothing but the radio for company until those ladies took me in,” he said. “My job was peeling potatoes and washing dishes, and I still like doing those things.”

We’d just sat down to dinner with Billy's favorite bass player, Gleason, when Billy took a bite of meat and threw down his cutlery, making me jump. “That fucking butcher,” he screamed, “I knew he was selling me a piece of shit.” He pushed up from the table and slammed into the bedroom, leaving me feeling as if several people had just walked out, taking all the energy and oxygen with them.

I rose to follow, but Gleason, used to these outbursts, put a gentle hand on my arm. “Why don’t you just sit down and finish your dinner?” he suggested quietly. “Best to leave him alone.” Then he began methodically cutting up his perfectly good steak.

I did the same.

He smiled at me. “Don’t worry, he’ll work it out.”

And he did. By the time the three of us had walked into Café Bohemia, Billy’s manic good-humor had been restored, helped by a few puffs of weed in the taxi. He opened the set by playing and singing in his hoarse, gravelly baritone, “Nancy With The Laughing Face,” only he changed the name to mine. “But you don’t have a laughing face,” he teased, joining me at the table afterwards. “And you should have been named something dark and biblical, like Rachel.”

“My Nemesis,” he called me when he took me to bed in the wee hours.

Years later I saw the movie Clean and Sober and thought, That's what it was like, living with Billy. It was like trying to make a life with a cocaine addict, though to my knowledge he'd never used the drug. If he'd lived long enough, I believe he would have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Mother had come out on that first trip to see my new digs and visit Ken, who was in the army, stationed at Governor’s Island, and who'd been with me when I met Billy at Birdland. (Looking little older than the pimply-faced kid on the cover of the album we had at home, he'd introduced himself after the first set, then asked Ken if he could walk me around the block.) She came out again when I was near-term with Katy - treating me to lunch at Schrafft’s Tea Room, taking me thrift shopping up and down 2nd Avenue, having her picture snapped at a night-club when Billy was accompanying a hot, new pop singer - and again when Sean came along. By that time, one of Billy’s songs had won the Grammy award, and we’d moved from our charming little penthouse in a quiet neighborhood, with a view of Central park to the east and the Hudson river to the west, into a large apartment on Riverside Drive, with high ceilings and parquet floors.

But all was not well because, as Billy’s career began to take off, he began to drink - the occasional beer of our courting days becoming merely a chaser for the stronger stuff. I remember the afternoon I first became aware of this. He had come back from a meeting with a young, Spanish, off-Broadway director who was interested in the folk-opera that Billy and his brother, Patrick, were working on. He described to me with shining eyes how he'd sat on the terrace of the man’s Greenwich Village apartment and sipped single-malt Scotch out of chased-silver goblets. He mentioned the opera almost as an afterthought.

Around the same time, I'd stumbled down the rain-slicked steps of a basement laundromat and twisted my ankle horribly. I can still see the cold, remote look on Billy's face as he stood at the end of the bed where my football-sized foot was propped on pillows, Sean beside me where I could easily tend him, and Katy on the floor with her coloring books and crayons. “I hope you're not expecting anything of me in the next few weeks,” he said flatly. “I'm going to be busy.”