George Washington slept here?
That’s an antique dealer’s joke, of course, and one the movies have used for years — as in Jack Benny’s 1942 comedy of the same name.
Nobody really knows where George slept, except in the house with the fabled cherry tree, or at the White House, where servants of color made his bed and polished its newly carved wood.
But joking owners down the years always used the expression, as a mysterious bed moved through antique dealers from where? France? Italy? To Canada and finally to Maine? Nobody knows.
The bed was sold by countless dealers who pointed out the distinctive holes in the wood, where ropes were put to support the mattresses of long ago, making it at least 100 years old.
The French Canadian Joly family passed it down through time, from grandfather Achille — a handsome, dapper racing horse veterinarian from Quebec, who,
when bored with life in rural Canada, came down to the roaring village of Waterville to play poker with the Levine brothers and treat local trotting horses.
Achille took the bed, too small for him and his wife, Katherine, and stuck it in an attic.
He then set about making friends and went into real estate, where he grew prosperous, and sent his son Cyril through four years of Colby and to Boston’s Harvard Law, leaving the aging bed to sleep in darkness.
There it lay alone and dusty in the dark attic at 237 Main St. in Waterville, while young Cyril went away to serve in the Great War.
At war’s end, Cyril came home and wed the lovely Lorette LaPointe, and eventually dragged the ancient bed down for his two sons and, joyfully, for his daughter Katherine, on Mayflower Hill Drive.
Now, Katherine, as a Waterville school girl, slept in it through high school.
Imagine how that lonely bed felt embracing, at last, a female.
It didn’t last long. Katherine left for Trinity College in Washington, D.C.
And so it sat in her old bedroom alone, pining for the redheaded girl who had left for college. And when the years flew past she became a teacher, got married to an actor and brought forth two daughters.
Then, one warm day in 1972, the Joly family of Maine sent a moving van full of furniture to Hollywood: dining table, chairs and antique chairs and four beds, two with pineapple headboards, and lo and behold, the storied twin bed George Washington didn’t sleep in.
Dawn, the first born, slept in it until her little sister, Jillana, moved it into her room. At last the fabled bed of lore had found a final home, it seemed, under the palms in the City of Angels.
They say, “It ain’t over until it’s over.”
Waterville, 2020. Katherine’s arthritis grew worse and forced her husband to move to the bedroom across the hall, where the small bed welcomed him.
And for the next three years the small bed became his.
In the summer of ’23, the little bed George didn’t sleep in began to show its age. So the writer bought a new bed and had the ancient one tucked away in other attics — waiting for other dreamers, other voices, other rooms.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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