The Master's Muse, page 3
Mother creamed my face back at the hotel. I lay in the bath, I lay in bed, but I couldn’t sleep. Nothing helped. Hours passed, George in and out, Mother imploring me to drink water, but I couldn’t. I asked who was dancing for me tonight. Otherwise it was just ache and time and the swollen flocking on the wallpaper turning to fanciful shapes—orchid, pinwheel, a rabbit scampering onto the dresser.
George leaned over me and I nearly retched at the scent of vodka on his breath—crossing the Atlantic from Paris to New York, I was three, Mother was seasick, and I saw again her green face, her pale lips, Oh, gods—she rocked in the berth—curse the odor of onion soup.
“Do you want a doctor? Tanny?”
Shook my head no, no doctor, afraid of what he might find. “Sleep,” I said, and at dawn it came.
Smoke. George was out on the balcony having a cigarette. Morning light, hazed by the drab day, filled the room like dirty dishwater.
What was yesterday?
Faun.
I got sick.
I must be better.
I didn’t ache nearly so much.
Letting him smoke, I sat up. But I couldn’t swing my legs over the side of the bed.
I pulled off the cover. I tested my toes. Nothing. Ache, though. It was still there. Flex?
Wouldn’t. Knees wouldn’t respond. The heavy left thigh was heavier. So was the right. Even my hips weren’t mine. Wait. Try again. No response.
When I spoke, my tone was steady. I was too disoriented to panic. It was all too odd.
I called, “George, I want to get up and I can’t move my legs.”
2
Outside the Capitol Theater in New York once, they displayed an iron lung over the course of a week. It looked like a tin coffin out on the sidewalk. Inside the theater Greer Garson cajoled for money after the newsreels. At a freak show I had seen “Polio Boy,” a gasping head poking out from an awful metal tube. I didn’t forget it. Pools closed in the summer, parents horrified by the scourge of our day. But always dancing, I rarely swam, just occasionally in the ocean—the Cape, Fire Island, Florida when Maria and I and two of the boys drove down for a quick trip on one occasion, singing our heads off in the car to Nat King Cole. We lolled on the beach and ate, ate, ate. Got so fat we had to go on strict diets. “Girls,” said our costumier, discerning brows arched, “I didn’t recognize you.” And we were tan. A disaster. We had to apply body makeup on every inch of exposed skin, stacks of it over my freckles. Skating and horseback riding were also forbidden, because they were bad for turnout.
But by the midfifties polio was close to preventable in America. Salk produced his vaccine and children lined up for inoculation. There wasn’t enough vaccine in 1956. Only the youngest dancers in the company received protection from polio before we went abroad.
Still, we didn’t think polio. Not Mother. Not George. Not me. My immovable legs couldn’t be paralyzed. Paralysis meant loss of feeling, we thought, and my legs wailed with sensation.
George sat on my bed and oh how I watched him, listened to him as I had as a young girl, to the god, the teacher, the man I completely trusted—my love, my darling.
“I’ve seen things. . . bizarre,” he said. “If body’s pushed, it reacts.” He hadn’t shaved, which alarmed me. “This girl I knew in St. Petersburg,” he said, “she was dancing a lot. She goes home one night after performance, lies on the floor, and stretches her legs up on wall, for rest.” I did that. I’d read with my legs up for hours. “She starts to relax,” George said, “and her feet take on life of their own. Jumping like—what’s that, you know, Mexican jumping beans? Hop-hop twitch all over the wall and she’s lying there watching her feet, they’re like chickens in somebody else’s yard.”
“You never told me about that,” I said.
“Lasts, I don’t know, fifteen, twenty minutes? Maybe half hour.”
He carried me gently—everything hurt—into the bathroom and waited patiently outside. I couldn’t go. He carried me back to bed, saying, “Don’t cry,” so I didn’t.
He went to the phone, and I lay there thinking of how he used to brag about me, “She is ideal Balanchine dancer,” he said, “trained up in the style. American legs,” he said, “they break my heart. Small head. Light bones. In the school she ties up her legs like a pretzel and walks on her knees. Make funny. Later I have to say, no more funny, you make funny too much. Soon you play Odette.”
George was speaking to someone, asking for a doctor to be sent. I thought of how Jerry Robbins had loved me too, saw my swoons in Symphony in C and said, “I want to be in that company!” Made me Pied Piper. Such fun! Swarming onstage jitterbugging and chewing gum. George got jealous if Jerry’s dances attracted more attention. Sometimes he wouldn’t let Jerry use me. In Jerry’s Ballade I played Pierrot, returned to life by a magic balloon. At the end of the ballet I let go of my balloon and watched as it floated up into the flies. On opening night the balloon drifted back down right in the middle of George’s lyrical Pas de Trois. Thereafter, the stage manager shot the balloon with a BB gun during the pause.
When George was still married to Maria and we were sneaking around, Jerry asked where he stood with me. I liked going out with him, laughing like hell, but I told him I loved George, that maybe it was a case of George got here first.
George opened the door to Mother and the heat returned, no longer pouring from me, but contained with fierce concentration inside. I heard Mother’s voice and I tried to respond, but in my mind I was climbing the steep metal stairs from the stage up to my dressing room at City Center, only they didn’t lead anywhere and I fell back to the depths of a pit. In the distance I heard another familiar voice, “Places, you pretty, pretty people,” but I couldn’t move.
Stabbing. Sharp knives in my spine brought me up and back into the room laddered by heat waves that wavered and spun in and out. In breaks of clarity I could tell Mother and George what was happening, and seeing the artificial lights I knew it was late afternoon and I knew that my legs weren’t up temporarily twitching in somebody’s yard. I knew they were dead, although shouting with pain.
I was too busy riding the hurt to consider whether I was dying. The fever was too high for me to care that a doctor came. His spectacles sparkled, his touch made me cry out.
“Forgive me,” he said in accented English. Just the sheet touching me hurt. Mother had torn it away to the floor and I watched it, the doctor examining me, the icy bite of his instruments and the sheet a white seething pool.
George had beautiful hands, a pianist’s hands, virile Russian hands that knew how to grab a woman. The doctor was gone. George sat at the bedside, one of his hands resting close to my face on the pillow, long fingers, patterns of hair, veins, nails I knew nearly as well as my own. Mother had pleaded with the doctor to give me something for the pain. But they couldn’t in diseases involving the central nervous system. My eyes drew in the opium of George’s hand.
A stretcher wouldn’t fit into the elevator. I was brought from the room in a canvas chair. In the hallway I thought they attempted to insert me into a cage: “No.”
“Tanny,” George’s nasal voice cut the fever, “it’s the elevator, see? Elevator in Europe.”
Golden accordion door—oh, yes, I could see. “You’re coming with me?”
“Of course,” he said, “we all fit.” I counted faces, his, Mother’s, two strangers who bore me in easily; at five feet six and a half I weighed only 108 pounds.
The motion, the jolt at the lobby, each second was distinct and magnified, warped to distortion: the swaddling blanket smashed me, the car outside jumped at me—no, just the wind, a thin dog racing away.
“Don’t turn on the siren,” Mother said.
She understood, she and George understood, and if they understood I was not lost. They said to drive carefully, but bumps punched, and when I was carried into a building for tests, they sent Mother and George away.
The next day they transferred me to another facility. There had been serious polio epidemics in Copenhagen several years earlier and Blegdems Hospital had developed groundbreaking treatments.
Nobody said “polio” to me, only that I was quarantined until the infectious stage passed.
The squeak of the linoleum floors: Can’t you put some wax on those floors? I wanted to scream. I saw a tall window and, outside, a gray brick wall. Coming and going, the high starched hats, crisp aprons of nurses. Blue dresses for the student nurses, the corps de ballet, white dresses for the principal nurses, the stars.
Somewhere in my delirium I remembered that we were soon to move on, and I dreaded that everyone had traveled to Stockholm without me.
A little pink face beneath her white tower of hat said, “No, madam, your mother and husband are here, right outside most of the time.”
“They’re waiting for me?” I could barely speak.
“They are!” Smiling, she had yellow hair.
“When can we leave?” I asked. I flustered her. Closing my eyes, I said, “Never mind.” I couldn’t turn my face from her, because my neck was too stiff.
The deadness invaded my arms and shoulders; it entered my trunk and strangled my lungs.
Dr. Hendriksen of the sculpted bronze hair and perfect English informed me that they had brought a respirator to help me breathe. The iron lung. I couldn’t care less if I died; the iron lung the key, the translation: polio.
“No,” I said.
“Nonsense,” he answered, “you’ll be much more comfortable.”
The transfer hurt badly and I passed out. That happens. Pain grows too intense and you black out, which is solace to know. I surfaced again. “Go with it”—the swooshing—said the doctor. For seconds, frightened I couldn’t breathe in there, I reacted as if underwater. I gasped, and air rushed in.
I had a collar. I faced a metal sphere. I had a rearview mirror showing the pink-and-yellow girl. “Call off the battle,” I said. Thought I said? Wanted to say?
“Don’t be sad,” she answered. “Your fever is down.”
And yes, I could breathe easier and the stabbing had lessened. But summoning all my weak might, I tested my toes and nothing moved. I could not even move my fingers.
The girl brought me notes she held to my eyes, one from Mother, Papa is coming, another from George, Tanitschka, you are not to go.
“And to read later, you have hundreds of letters and telegrams from throughout the world!”
Good lord, a fan. I asked her to remove the floral arrangements. Just like the sick one in The Immoralist, I abhorred them. I had to be brave; the flowers destroyed me.
The iron lung felt warm and womblike at first, but at night the bellows of my green metal bed was the breathing of monsters, a horror ballet, and I wanted out. As if George could hear me, I spoke silently, what is the point? Eurydice as you very well know cannot be saved. Sometimes the lung produced the sensation of flying, but I was the plane itself, not inside it. I soared far and fast away in the sky and into space where the sun had burned out and cold spinning planets whizzed by me like tops. Then I was outside in Colorado against the red rocks, dancing Faun beneath a full moon, a windswept Serenade, fireflies pricking the night. But in the wings in Colorado there had been oxygen tanks guarded by uniformed nurses, given the altitude, and as I danced in the lung the tanks flew from their hidden perches out to the stage—and I awoke to the real world, the squeaky linoleum and my dead body attached to my thinking head. Dr. Hendriksen kindly explained that I was already getting better and would get better yet. I replied very reasonably that I couldn’t be in the lung another minute. He didn’t answer. The nurses worked over me, hands in the portholes, washing my soreness, turning me, adjusting tubes, always polite, even times I muttered goddamn you, hell, fuck—the ever-elegant Mrs. Balanchine. Sometimes I did cry a little. George couldn’t see me. I didn’t cry from discomfort, pain, embarrassment, but from frustration. The patience I needed was monumental, and that’s why they call the ill patients. I didn’t have it and I was tired unto death.
Then suddenly Mother and George banked the sides of the lung. Soon they took me out and strapped on a hard-shelled respirator the size of a bread box; it looked like a turtle enthroned on my chest, and I felt hopeful that day.
Dr. Hendriksen announced to the press that I was no longer in critical condition. “But she will stay in the hospital for some time, followed by a long period of convalescence.” Hooray. November 15 was the day of his announcement. Later I affixed dates to what had transpired. I danced Faun on October 28. The company left on Halloween into the winter of Stockholm. George and Mother remained. A supply of vaccine was flown over by the American Embassy for fifty dancers afraid they were next. The whole healthy lot returned to New York on November 12.
On the night of my diagnosis, I learned, George got drunk with Dr. Hendriksen and in the wee hours knocked at the door of our ballet mistress, Vida.
“Tanny has polio,” he said. She tried to embrace him, but he pulled away. He wouldn’t enter her room, rested brokenly against the wall in the hallway. I might or might not live. It was his fault, he said. For leaving Maria. For creating La Valse, my signature piece, an exuberant girl’s first formal party at the end of which she is beguiled by Death. And he was most haunted by Resurgence, a dance he had constructed for a March of Dimes benefit when I was fifteen. George himself played Polio, ominous and black-caped, who entered a classroom of ballerinas and struck me down. From my pretend wheelchair I did ports de bras so plaintive that from nets high in the flies it showered dimes. At the end of the dance I stood, cured and triumphant. “An omen,” George said in Copenhagen, in his fatalistic Russian way.
Okay, George, an omen, I might have agreed. But if there is blame involved, how come I got it, not you?
The guilt over Maria was a religious feeling about the sacred bonds the Russian Orthodox Church ascribed to marriage. George didn’t go to church much, too busy, but he had been brought up in it, and the ceremony, much like the stage, enthralled him. His feelings for art and religion remained deeply enmeshed.
He prayed for my life, and repledged himself to me if I lived.
It wasn’t hard to intuit the pledge, but I no longer cared. I didn’t care about anything. I was a twenty-seven-year-old dancer locked up in a broken body.
Get better? Why?
Mother sat every minute at the bedside knitting, click-click. My philandering husband said he was demolished, yet he got to stand there and even go out in the rain. I could see it, the harsh Danish rain dashed by the wind so that it struck horizontally at the window. Even on days it didn’t rain, Mother said, the clouds sat so low they draped people’s shoulders. On the days it didn’t rain, Mother and George arrived out of mist and wind, dust-rain glazing their faces, thin layers of moisture and dirt. George went through dozens of handkerchiefs each week. I liked, held to, and resented the city’s smell of salt, mud, and fishy water that Mother and George brought into my room. I waited each morning for it to cut rubbing alcohol, steamed wool, and hospital disinfectant, as I awaited the light that didn’t come until ten, when at last it commenced its creep up the wall.
I was despondent. The worst pain was over, but the stiffness that followed was unlike anything I had ever experienced as a dancer. I couldn’t sit up, could not bear to be raised or propped up by the bed. They packed me in steaming wool to break up muscular adhesions, flesh of cement.
George sat by the bed reading newspapers, asked if I wanted to hear an article.
“No.”
He brought books of English crossword puzzles. Some trick. I had always done crossword puzzles. He couldn’t do them, the Russian. He’d concentrate, scowling. “Tanny,” he ventured. “Holds soup. Starts with a t. Six letters and I think ends with g.”
“For god’s sake,” I said.
“What?”
“It can’t end with g.”
“Then. . . ?”
“It ends with n. N. Tureen.”
I think it hurt George that for several days I kept a telegram from Jerry on my pillow. George was all cheer and no-nonsense. Two dancers in the Swedish Royal Ballet stricken by polio, he stressed, fully recovered and presently danced with the company. We must be patient, discern which muscles could be brought back. He thought he was some kind of polio expert. “Nerves are like carrots,” he said, “start underground. You can’t see anything going on and then boom, carrot’s there.”
Jerry wrote: Dearest one, There is so much we can’t understand that happens in life, and that we will never understand. Just know that I don’t stop thinking about you. Soon, rapture, I will see you.
Jerry had struck the right chord, and I had wanted to hurt George.
As a result of a conspiracy between George and Mother, Father didn’t come. It wasn’t his classes at the university stopping him, it was felt he would be too emotional.
But he called, and Mother propped the receiver up with a pillow and I heard him.
“Ma chère, are you there?”
Almost at once I felt more like myself. “Don’t talk that loudly,” I said to him, “you’re cracking my ear. Transatlantic calls are efficient these days, old boy.”
“Tanaquil,” he said softly, “you must use your mind now. Do you understand? You must use your good mind to navigate the sharp shoals. Listen to George.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“He will not lead you wrong. Regain your strength and come back to me.”
“I do miss New York.”
“It waits.”
“À bientôt.”
“À bientôt, Tanaquil.”
Father. Home.
Letters came each morning and Mother read them to me. Jerry’s missives arrived afternoons, special delivery, more to look forward to.
