“That was Lu's doing. Don't get me wrong, I was a good musician. I got my degree in piano from the Curtis Institute and that wasn't shabby; a lot of concert careers came out of Curtis. But I knew I didn't have what it took. My mother wanted me to come home and teach school, but I was out of the closet, which could get you killed in redneck Pennsylvania back then. And I loved musicals. I came to New York in 'forty-one and I figured I'd get work as an accompanist.” He laughed. “Me and about a million other kids who could play the piano and didn't want to live at home. It was a crowded field, baby. I would have starved if the war hadn't broken out. I couldn't go into the army because my eyes were bad, so I was one of the few men my age left in the city. I started working, and then I met Lu, and the rest is history.” He traced the inscription on his cuff some more. “But if Lu hadn't come along, I'd have stayed in New York in a crummy apartment somewhere, coaching wannabe singers as long as my fingers held out. Davy and I were just a couple of stagestruck boys from the sticks who wanted to be near the bright lights.”

Carrie looked up at the picture of the young man wearing his triumphant smile and the crazy robe. Her mind flashed back to the two Saturdays long ago that she'd spent secretly looking up her father and her grandmother in the library at Lincoln Center. She remembered the hunger she'd felt to know their world, and how frustrated she'd been because she couldn't get a feel for it from the books and press clippings. She remembered sneaking into the Vivian Beaumont Theater and the magic she'd found there. “Thank you,” she said. “I don't know anything about the theater—the insider part of it. I always wanted to, but… it just didn't happen.”

George understood what she wasn't saying. “In your mother's defense,” he said, “it had to be a rough gig being Bobby Manning's wife—and Lu Lawson's daughter. They were two of the great ones. But they weren't good family people and they probably weren't easy to live with. There's a price tag on greatness. I don't know how high it should be—I've never figured that out—but I do know when people do what Bobby and Lu did, that doesn't come for free.” For a moment Carrie thought George was about to burst into song—or tears. But then he held up his hands in mock preacher style and intoned, “And, my brethren, thus endeth the gospel in bullshit for the day. Let me take you on the grand tour of the Hideaway.”