Tag: Wally Findlay Galleries

1950s/Wife No. 2

THE QUÉBEC CONNECTION

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So when my Dad put on his Dress Army Uniform that night in 1954 (to go out to the Stork), what the hell was he getting into?

The Quebec Connection, that’s what. Quebec City is a city but it ain’t New York City. In comparison, QC comes off as a sleepy government center with a walled old town (unique for a North American City) and a lingua franca that is neither English nor Spanish (again, very unusual in norteamérica). Both offer quaint streets and lots for tourists to see and eat. However, the most apparent difference is the money game that is the core of New York, New York and la Francophonie which is the heart of Québec, Québec.  NYC has culture too, but more in a polyglot way (and not so much French, although that is changing today as the economy in France continues to suck eggs)

That fateful night at The Stork Club, Dad was introduced to the retiring antiques sales clerk at Wally Findlay Gallery, my Mom Michele Rousseau. She came from a long line of Quebecers stretching back to the 17th century (which is very common north of the border). Like my Dad, she was the younger of two children born to her parents Margo Alain and Paul Rousseau.

As for Margo, she was also the youngest of seven and quite possibly the most ambitious. Together with her older brother Gaston, they were the only children that worked with their Father, my Great-Grandfather P.A. Alain (everyone called him P.A. which you have to say as “Pay Ah” in French). Margo had a private office in her Father’s salon de fourrures where, as my Mom tells it, she would “do nothing but just chat on the phone with her friends all day long.”

As the dear reader can infer, my Mom and her Mom had a complicated relationship.

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Foreign Adventure/My Dad's 5 Wives/Nostalgic New York/Wife No. 2

TALE OF TWO IMMIGRANTS

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In the mid-1950s, Michele Rousseau was a beautiful, elegant girl working at Wally Findlay Galleries on East 57th Street. She was barely 20 when she was dragged out yet again one night to the Stork Club on East 53rd Street by her extroverted mother. There she met a handsome man in a uniform and her life would be changed forever as she would soon become wife no. 2.

I know more about Michele than any other wife for one simple reason. She was my Mom.

Like my Dad’s family, she was part of a family of immigrants. On both sides, my grandparents were foreign-born and had deep ties to the Old World. But on just about every other social, economic, or cultural basis, there the similarities ended. Whereas my Grandfather Mikas Arlauskas made the arduous sea voyage literally in steerage class in 1914 from Europe to New York, my Grandmother Marguerite Alain did the trip in first class in the other direction some ten years later to be married off to her fiancé Paul Rousseau in Paris.

Later on in 1948, my Mom arrived in New York, probably in her stepfather’s Cadillac, the hood hot from plying the New York State Thruway from Montréal.

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