Reacquaintance with Daddy
The year is 1955. I am living in Palo Alto with my first husband, Christian Bay, a Norwegian political scientist. I have begun to have therapy in San Mateo with Dr. Sheimo, a tall, blonde, good-looking young man. I am telling him about my father who got a job in Washington D.C. in 1933, and never returned to our home in a suburb of Pittsburgh, PA. I tell Dr. Sheimo, “I think he lives in New York City.” Dr. Sheimo says, “You can look him up. There is a library one block away from here. They will have his address.” They had his address: 157 East 57th Street.
I wrote to him and later met him. I hadn’t seen him for many years. He looked very different from the Daddy I remembered from childhood. I would never have recognized him. He was no taller than me, that is, five feet tall. He was very thin, partially bald, with a little black mustache. He was wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and red tie. We met in my uncle’s apartment. He was overjoyed to see me. He kept saying, “You’re so beautiful!” He took me out to lunch walking arm in arm.
The restaurant was in a nice hotel. But he kept talking about a special diet, which he believed had saved his life. He was urging me, as he had urged many of his friends to try it. We found out later that it was a complete fraud. My uncle, who had his own radio program on WOR-AM told us that everyone at the station knew it was a fraud. The man who presented it was not a doctor nor nutritionist. It was just a gimmick.
My Daddy asked me what I intended to do, now that I had returned from Norway. I said I might stay in NYC or go to California. “Go to California!” he said, with great enthusiasm. “I always wanted to live there.” Afterwards I thought that was strange that he seemed so happy to have found me, but then urged me to go to California. I didn’t know that he had a very jealous, possessive, Puerto Rican wife. He knew it wouldn’t work, having both of us in the same city. That is one of the reasons I settled in California.
Part II: Maria Theresa
This part of the story begins in a Guest House in Washington, D.C., where my Daddy, Henry Richter lived after leaving Mother and me in a suburb of Pittsburgh, PA. It was 1933, the beginning of Roosevelt’s New Deal. A friend of Daddy’s, Steve told him about a clairvoyant in Richmond, VA. Daddy said, “I am a scientist, an engineer. I don’t believe in such things.” Nevertheless, he took the information and paid her a visit.
The clairvoyant saw him as a Naval Officer, which he was in World War 1. She described in detail the torpedoing and sinking of the ship on which my Daddy was an officer. Then she told him he would soon meet a very beautiful girl, whom he would love passionately and marry.
Soon after that Steve suggested that they take a vacation together, a trip to Puerto Rico. There he met Maria Theresa, a very beautiful, shapely teen-aged dancer. (She was five years older than me.) She was the smallest one in a chorus line, all wearing Dutch costumes. She had long, blonde hair, though her hair was actually dark brown. They became lovers. My Daddy promised to bring her to the US and help her become, “the best flamenco dancer in the world!” They got married and eventually settled in NYC.
My first contact with Maria Theresa came as a letter, written in a flowery, old-fashioned style, which I received during our sabbatical year in Wengen, Switzerland. She said that “Enrico” was keeping her from meeting her grandchildren, i.e., our children. Eva and Jan who were at that time 13 and 9 years old. (They had no children of their own.) She hoped we would come to dinner with them upon our return to New York. I wrote back that we would be happy to do so.
When we eventually returned to the US, we spent a very pleasant evening with them. They entertained us in their sumptuously furnished apartment. They showed us albums with articles about her numerous performances as a Flamenco dancer. André later pointed out that the reviews were typed on a typewriter, not clipped from a newspaper.
I liked Maria Theresa. She was really beautiful, lively and playful. She played something for us on her grand piano, did a little dancing. She showed me the screened-in corner where she was painting her dreams, just as I had been painting my dreams in Davis. They took us out to dinner in a well-known restaurant next to Carnegie Hall, where Daddy used to go to concerts as a teenager. It was a very pleasant visit.
The next time I heard from them it was a telegram from Daddy, sent from Madrid. They were in trouble. My Daddy was getting old, no longer earning money. They needed to reduce their expenses. A second-cousin of Maria Theresa had offered to rent an apartment or house for them in Madrid, where the cost of living would be much less than in Manhattan. They sold everything in their beautifully furnished apartment, except Maria Theresa’s grand piano, which they sent to Madrid. When they arrived there, they were astounded to find that the house arranged for them was a dump in an industrial suburb. The second-cousin had taken their money and vanished. They were stranded.
I sent Daddy $100 (much more in those times.) I encouraged Mother to send them something, which she did. They returned temporarily to Puerto Rico, where they lived with friends on a remote Army base. They had no money.
Maria Theresa was very unhappy there. She couldn’t sleep at night. She missed her NY apartment with a good TV! She missed her friends. One night she took an overdose of sleeping pills and died. Her suicide note was signed, “Your lost Baby Doll.”
My Daddy was heart-broken and guilt-ridden. He moved back to NYC, renting a cheap apartment in the vicinity of their former home. He believed that she was there, calling to him. The walls of his room were covered with pictures of her.
The last time I spoke to him it was by telephone. We were about to fly to Europe with our children. He had planned to meet us at Idlewild Airport (now JFK,) to bring a bottle of champagne, as he had done once before. When he didn’t arrive, I called him up. He apologized for not coming as planned. He said he was in bed with a cold. “Don’t you have someone there, to take care of you?” I asked. He said I shouldn’t worry about him. He wished us a “Bon voyage!”
When we returned to the US some time later, I learned that he had died. (He was in his late 80s.) He would have been buried in a pauper’s grave if a friend, an Irish woman living in the same building hadn’t brought in her Catholic priest who buried him in a Catholic cemetery. It was near Hackensack Cemetery in NJ, where my family has a plot “in perpetuity.”
I later found that grave in the Catholic cemetery. It was on a wooded hillside, above a little stream. I later had a small, symbolic memorial marker made, (like a miniature gravestone) with his name and dates on it. It stands by the family gravestone in Hackensack Cemetery. Most of my family is buried there, including my husband, Andre.
Daddy is once again part of our family.