The Master's Muse, page 6
It was not disingenuous. He fixed the broken latch on my lacquered antique Chinese jewelry box and I thought about his care of the pianos back at the studios. He was always the last to leave rehearsals, clearing ashtrays, shutting lids over keys, and stacking scores, as if the pianos were people and his personal responsibility too. His loves were concrete. He had lived through adversity into appreciation of what was definite, present, or, as he said, today.
“When you going to try?” he’d ask a hesitant dancer. “What about now?”
Another George homily: “Nothing ethereal about ballet. It’s bodies in space. We don’t dance spiritual feelings, because there is a body onstage that must move.”
We hit the mats to regain my dancer’s posture in one of the smaller wood-floored physical therapy rooms, sweating like pigs in the southern summer. We would set the exercises while he was here, and I’d do the repetitions myself. No mirrors. “I’m mirror now,” he said.
“You weren’t before?” I asked incredulously.
“I mean I more want you feeling it, dear, and it isn’t to see, we’re not making picture for audience but three-dimensional moving sculpture.” Frankenstein monster, I thought, amused and inspired, usually, by George’s God complex.
We attacked my inability to pull over from back to stomach using my torso and stronger left shoulder alone.
“Look, I will lead and you feel,” he said. “Follow the motion.”
I did; I still couldn’t do it alone.
“Okay, then I train therapist to be me for after I go,” he said.
We’d work fifteen minutes, rest five, another fifteen, another five—timing calculated in consultation with the doctor. During rests I’d scoot off the sticky gray mat, lie flat on the cooler floor, and watch George sitting against a wall, watching me, acknowledging the debacle of my body: how odd, how multifarious are the aspects of human experience, and how extraordinary that a person carrying half of her body as dead-weight could yet throb with energy, life force, and a will so insistent that why—and what is the metaphysical reason behind this?—couldn’t she get up and walk? We knew why, of course, down to our toes—pardon the pun—but the fact remained thorny, hard to fathom and approach. The thoughts in our eyes, realer than words, fell away as we plunged into work again: into the literal body.
I ached at night. As an antidote to my aches and the possibility of running into inquisitors on the main campus, we frequented Willie Mars’s cottage down the road and drank vodka George brought from New York with Willie and his wife, Sophia, on their porch as the night cooled. We were marooned in a dry state and liquor was banned from the hospital grounds. Nobody obeyed.
“Those patients are cagey,” Willie said, “get hold of the local moonshine, if need be.”
“I wouldn’t know where to get it,” Sophia said, “and I’ve lived here my entire life.”
“I keep you innocent, sugar,” said Willie.
“Innocent, ha!” she retorted. “Point is, those folks aren’t only resourceful, they can charm squirrels out of trees.”
“Birds,” Willie said.
“Squirrels, ’cause they’re bigger,” Sophia overrode him.
The trees dripped moss over red soil, and hoot owls blinked glowing eyes from high branches that sheltered the yard. The Deep South was novel to me. Like Willie and Sophia, most of the staff members were locals and some of the kindest people I’d ever met—and they moved very slowly, another impression of the South that proved valid. But who among us had any pressing appointments?
Slow, quiet, could be a pleasure. George and I took the double swing on the Mars’s porch, my back against cushions, my legs in his lap. The motion of the swing soothed, the rocking creak of Willie and Sophia’s chairs creating with the swing’s chain a restful syncopation.
Yet Sophia’s remark about the charm and resourcefulness of the polios nettled me like an itch, too rah-rah about how special we all were. Sophia was a dark reedy woman with a surprisingly big voice; she should have sung opera. Willie was lighter and stocky, and his sharp widow’s peak rather comically matched his pointy goatee. Of the pair, Sophia was clearly in charge.
“They’re resourceful because they have to be,” I said to her. “Charming? A few. A lot more are merely insistent, like mules.”
Sophia threw back her head and laughed her big laugh. “I’ve got something for you, missy,” and got up, real slow, and went into the house.
“One more,” I said to George.
“No, you’re in training.”
“Liar, you’re afraid you’ll run out before you go back to New York.”
“So we get moonshine. You’ll use your insistence.”
“Sophia is attempting to lure me into occupational therapy,” I told him. “Half a shot, come on.” He succumbed.
“Her doctor prescribed occupational therapy,” Willie said to George, and, nodding at me: “She wheels in bold as you please, and asks Sophia, ‘Is the intention to occupy me or to train me for a new occupation modeling clay pots?’”
“Bad girl,” said George, and he swatted my knee.
“It was a perfectly straightforward question,” I said. I hated clay and baskets and anything else I expected in that room, where Sophia ruled.
Sophia, however, obviously wasn’t put off, relating the story to Willie as hysterically funny.
“I don’t care for explaining ballet to reporters,” George said to Willie, “but is part of my job. This one”—me—“said to a very nice man asking her one easy question after a show—”
“Don’t tell,” I said, feigning regret.
“She said,” my husband continued, “‘I don’t give a shit, I’m going home to soak my feet.’”
“I’d been under torture,” I told Willie, “by him.”
We fell quiet, breathing in the potent odor of second-bloom magnolias and counting the beats, for my part, of the silences between the vibrating sobs of the cicadas.
“It’s for my hands,” I admitted to George. “But I’m only interested in making you tie clips and cuff links,” I quipped. “Sophia says metal work’s too advanced.”
“If is for your hands you must do it,” said George, rubbing my feet.
“For once, darling,” I said to him, “could you be unpredictable?”
“No.”
Sophia emerged from the house with a large paper bag. She pulled up her rocker and brought forth brilliant yellow and cerulean-blue strips, half an inch wide, of a dense fabric with a satiny sheen that fell in waterfalls from her palms.
“Well?” she asked.
“They’re gorgeous,” I said.
She gave me a bunch, and as I fingered their smoothness and resiliency, she said, “I thought we’d weave place mats.”
“On a loom?” I said.
Sophia chortled. “Uh-uh, by hand. We can do them in rows and knot them off, along the theory of knitting.”
“I can do this?” I asked her.
“Yes, and in the end you’ll have them to keep or give as gifts.”
“You should have seen Sophia and her catalogues from Atlanta,” Willie told George, “searching away.”
I was touched.
“I knew you’d want something challenging and unique,” Sophia told me.
“And glitzy,” said George. “Tanny’s Fifth Avenue girl.”
“I got that,” Sophia teased me.
Back in my room, I pictured the colors, bright stripes in the dark, my fingertips recalled the satiny smoothness, and I felt excited about getting started. And I wanted to weep because of the hoards of people who had to expend so much energy helping me, using their own precious life force to keep me going—why, George, pushing me up the steep path over tree roots and rocks, could have been training himself all these years for the strength to haul me around.
“Hot?” he asked. Each night he bathed me. I was learning to get into a bathtub myself, but I couldn’t yet, and getting out sounded harder than Everest. I thanked my lucky stars and every saint I didn’t believe in that I’d mastered the toilet bit, but I couldn’t bathe. I had come to know I could fight the bathing and render myself and everyone involved abject, or I could accept it.
“Pretend you are Cleopatra,” George said. “I’m slave.” He pulled back the coverlet and put the rubber sheet on the bed, and then I slowly shifted from the chair to the bed and he helped me off with my dress, my brassiere, and my underpants. With George, I always wished I were prettier, but half of me was nearly pretty, and if he wasn’t too tired he seemed to take sensual pleasure in running the sponge over me, dipping it back in the water, the motion bonding us in a new way.
There hadn’t been much hanky-panky—George’s term, he got a kick out of American slang—since he’d arrived, but the bathing, the bookcase, the exercises on the mats were also actions of love.
“Czar’s wife,” George said, “Empress Alexandra, never washed her hair herself. Not once.”
“And look at the price she paid for that,” I said languidly.
“I’ll make you pay,” George answered, “tomorrow.”
Pay in work. In our early days, I was an expert seductress. Tired or grouchy, next thing he knew we’d be flailing about. “You want to kill me?” he’d say.
“Yes, kill with love.”
“What I get, I marry young girl.”
Our first night together was a scream. He could be extremely prudish and failed to conceal his surprise that I wasn’t a virgin. At that, I couldn’t stop laughing.
“Don’t laugh,” he said tenderly, “I would worry about you with somebody else.”
He toweled me off while rolling the rubber sheet back, his arm muscles taut and pronounced as he completed the slow procedure, his manly hawkish face a study in concentration. I loved the vertical dips in the topography of his cheeks, crevices more than lines that ran from under his cheekbones to just above his jaw; they were similar to my father’s and unusual in the faces of American men. George had dimples too, but only if he smiled broadly, and seeing them was a big reason I worked at making him laugh.
When I was dry on the cotton bedding again, he powdered me for coolness, pulled the top sheet to my waist, stripped himself, and went into the bathroom for a shower.
If only I could hang up his plaid shirt, crease his trousers—well, I could. Shifting my weight to my left shoulder, I scooted to the edge of the bed and reached for the chair; hooked my arm around an armrest and wheeled it close. It took bodily rearrangement to point myself at the proper angle, but I gave the deep effort and seated myself without falling—I was covered with bruises and tried to avoid adding to their design. Now! George had finished the task of setting up my room properly. Everything was at wheelchair-level, and furniture against the walls. Naked and happy, I hung up his shirt and pants, tossed his underwear into the hamper, and set his turquoise and silver American Indian bracelet on the mantelpiece. Maria’s people had given him the bracelet and he cherished it as a symbol of his American citizenship.
I was about to retrieve a pair of clean briefs from the bureau when he opened the bathroom door, a towel wrapping his waist, and looked for a second about to holler, “Tanny! You are all steamed up and sweaty again. Besides, now in the morning you will be weak and sore and spoil work!”
I threw him a goofy smile, what else could I do?
He appraised the situation and, collecting himself, he said, “Thank you, dear.”
A rush of sheer terror charged through me at how much I loved him.
He left. It had been sensible and mature to encourage him not to stay long, to recommence his life in New York and prepare for my eventual release from Warm Springs. But I missed his touch, his care, his company, and had I been Cleopatra, I never would have let him go.
Our exercises produced good results. I could turn back to front within a month, my shoulders grew stronger, my balance improved so impressively that the therapists brought out the leg braces. No crutches, just parallel bars I held on to as I stood in the braces a little longer each day. By August I had learned to scale Everest successfully, hauling myself from the bath and into the chair like a seal.
In late August, a letter brought news that Stravinsky had fully recovered and was in New York rehearsing a premiere for the fall season at the Philharmonic.
That day in the occupational therapy room I wove a place mat furiously—don’t think, I inwardly chanted. He is Stravinsky! I had ten whole years as a principal dancer, ten good years. I had inspired Antony Tudor and Frederick Ashton and Merce Cunningham and Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine.
George, you’re with Stravinsky right now, I thought.
Don’t think. Why shouldn’t he be? Could be they were eating and drinking together and having a whale of a good time. It was nice to think of somebody having a whale of a good time.
Only one other inmate was present in OT, a teenager on crutches painting at an easel, which would have been easier sitting down, but why would he sit if he could stand, even awkwardly? I understood.
Soon it would be fall. The ripe fragrance of late summer filling the room from the open windows reminded me of the studio much more than of school. I’d quit school and studied with a tutor from the age of thirteen. I used to tease George by saying, “My body, my body, what about my mind?” It seemed awfully ironic that again, even after I couldn’t dance, my life had to be so much about my physical self.
If the heavy late-summer fragrance reminded me of the studio, it meant sweat, rosin, and woolen tights, and thinking of it brought along the memory of roses I had cradled onstage during curtain calls, drenched like a racehorse.
Don’t think. But it came, the hollow backstage full of dancers stretching and jumping, the orchestra tuning up, the heave of my chest as I stepped into the light and just went, like a jazz musician, flying on sound and my body that somehow did not let me down onstage, that did as George said it would do. How I loved the strut of Western Symphony, and the huge black feather hat I wore. I was so good in hats. I thought of my straw hat—designed from Greta Garbo’s in Camille—in Jerry’s The Concert, where I was a girl so enthralled by piano playing that she doesn’t notice her chair grabbed right out from under her bottom.
Sophia returned from her bihourly trip down the hall for coffee and sat beside me. “Hands sore?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“So stop.”
“I’ll finish the row.”
The chicory mixed with her perfume, gardenia. I’d miss her.
Reading my mind, she said, “I heard you might be leaving us soon.”
“They’re talking about it,” I said.
“I hate graduations.”
I kissed Sophia on the cheek.
“Why, thank you, Tanny,” she said. Then the teenager called for help and she got up.
I loved graduations. Sure, I would miss her, but I couldn’t wait to go home. Phone inquiries led me to believe I could get better therapy for my current needs in New York. Besides, the South with its de facto segregation and still active Klan had begun to grate on me badly. If less blatantly, New York was also benighted, but in my world of artists, people were closer to getting it right. Right before I got sick George had hired Arthur Mitchell, black and from Harlem, and in response to the complaints of two mothers of corps girls, George dismissed the young ballerinas. Matricide, I thought, would have been a fairer and surer method of alleviating the problem.
George had brought Arthur into the company to partner me. Don’t think.
I finished my row and, waving to Sophia and the kid, wheeled out of OT. I went down the hall and into the elevator glaring my don’t-talk-to-me-I’m-not-in-the-mood look. Had anyone granted me one wish six months ago, I’d have been cured and a good enough balancer to dance Princess Aurora. My one wish now was for privacy. Please.
In the courtyard, intense heat dispensed with the need to keep anyone off. I was instantly slick, my muscles oiled and loose. I longed to sit in the sauna at Monsieur Louis on East Sixty-Third and I longed for a manicure and a decent haircut. From the light, the columns blushed copper, and the roses tumbling down from the arbor seemed to drip the gold leaf painters used. The flagstone patio burned my bare foot when I took it out of my slipper and tested a stone with a toe. Apart from my room this was the one place, in the blazing month of August, where I could be alone.
Forgive me, God, if you exist, which I doubt, but I was sick of cripples. Sure, many were interesting and admirable, but en masse I’d had it. The therapeutic benefits of living in proximity to others worse off had long since diminished. And with polio, as with war victims, I saw a few so damaged in body or mind they wobbled my own precarious sense of stability. I wasn’t Gandhi. I was not even a celebrated dancer any longer, someone with enough distance from suffering to witness it out of the compassion of equanimity. I was out here raw and alone, just hanging on, hanging over the fire by my chipped fingernails.
Not long ago a troll in a handmade wheelchair showed up at the train station uninvited. Polios arriving on the train unaccompanied and unannounced weren’t unusual, especially at the height of the epidemics once word of FDR’s hospital spread. Destitute people. Desperate people from desperate families, who’d chosen to abandon damaged kin. The patients were dealt with on an individual basis, often transferred to other hospitals where funding and space could be found.
But this troll carried a fat satchel of cash. Evidently his family had saved up for years to send him here. He was beyond help, if much help had been at all possible in the beginning. His torso bent far to the right and nearly fused with his right hip. The right arm was useless and withered and he kept his elbow tucked into his belly, out of the way. I am grateful I couldn’t see his legs, just the tiny feet dangling. His neck, left shoulder, and left arm were bullish from compensation, bulging, red, and powerfully fast as they shoved him ahead in the chair.
He was given a new chair and allowed to stay for a week. But they could do nothing further for him and, needing the bed, they told him to keep his money and return home.
The night before he was to leave he sat in the dining room unable to eat, as he had voraciously since he’d materialized. He had probably never tasted such food, sat in such a grand room, seen clothes like ours—his were rags; he’d been given a fresh outfit too. He hadn’t by anyone’s guess seen a girl as beautiful, lively, and adorned as fourteen-year-old Caroline, who, in the egalitarian spirit of Warm Springs, was seated that night beside him at his table.
