Читать книгу Ethel Merman, Mother Teresa...and Me - Tony Cointreau - Страница 19
ОглавлениеOne thing that helped me survive the following years was my love of the piano. My parents had allowed me to study piano ever since I was tall enough to sit on a bench and reach the keys. Until I was eleven, we did not have a piano, so every day when we were in New York I went to Tata’s house to practice. She was the one person who always listened to and encouraged me in my childhood dreams.
As far back as I could remember, my only desire in the world besides wanting to be perfect enough to deserve my mother’s love was to dedicate my life to one of the arts. The one hope I clung to at that young age was that I would someday have a career in show business. It might seem like a bit of a stretch, but I confided to Tata that it would either be that, or become a missionary. She understood.
When Tata had been a young woman in a convent school in Boston, she had fallen in love and eloped with an aristocratic young man from a diplomatic family in Portugal. She lived with her young husband and their baby in his family’s castle, far away from Boston and home. Tata said the family treated her with such disdain that she suffered agonies of homesickness and finally went home to visit her mother, leaving her young son in the care of her in-laws. When she returned, they had disappeared with him. Tata, who had phlebitis in her leg, traveled on crutches from one end of Europe to the other in search of them, but could not trace them because of the family’s diplomatic immunity. Ultimately she realized that these people were too rich and too powerful for her to win back her son. Therefore she lavished all her maternal love on my brother and me.
