I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [162]
I was over forty by then, and my dancing career was slowing down. Having recuperated from a recent knee operation, I was back to performing, albeit with a doctor’s warning that if I continued, he would probably see me in another year for a second operation. I was thrilled just to be able to dance again.
New York City Ballet was headed to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and I was scheduled to dance in two marvelous roles: Meditation, and the last movement of Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet, roles choreographed for Suzanne Farrell and me by Balanchine. I was commuting between New York and Washington.
Lobelia wrote to tell me, “We’ve got our tickets for the ballet, Sunday, February 29 [1976]. The whole family’s coming, Jacques.” She was thrilled to see me and have her ballet fix. “Brad Jr. wants you to stay with us in Bethesda; it is only a few minutes’ drive across the Potomac to the Kennedy Center. You can save on hotels; it’ll be like old times, Jacques. And you can meet the grandchildren!”
I called Lobelia: “Carrie’s coming down too, and we’ll have our bags at the theater so we can go home with you right after the performance.”
Making schedules, giving orders, organizing things. I love it. I was excited—Carrie and I would be living with the Bishops again.
Two days before our date with the Bishops, my knee went out onstage, so I called Carrie, saying, “Don’t come down. Stay home, I’m coming back.” On Saturday morning, depressed, I limped my way back to New York. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, just focus on healing and returning to dance. Lobelia, Brad, and their family would come to the performance, find out I was injured, and would surely call Carrie or me in New York.
At the doctor’s office the next day, I was told, “No performing for a while.”
A dancer’s identity is wrapped up in his or her body. If you can’t dance, you lose identity. I wandered around New York, lost. Then I would exercise, take a ballet class, reinjure myself, doctors again—therapy, back in dance class—too soon—injured again—and so on. Getting older, but trying to hold on, and putting on a smiling face—eating, drinking, going to parties, and basically marking time, inwardly miserable. Somewhere, a little voice in the brain was saying, “Why didn’t Lobelia call to see how I am?”
“Carrie, have you heard from Lobelia?”
I would have thought she’d have been on the phone the morning after they attended the February 29 performance and heard of my injury.
One morning, up early, unable to sleep and wandering the city streets, I spied a headline in “Mystery Family Found, Bodies Burned.” It recounted how, on Tuesday, March 2, a ranger on fire watch in North Carolina spotted a tendril of smoke in the valley below, and conscientiously drove down to investigate. The ranger came across a fire in a pit. In the pit, flames crackled amid the swirling smoke of damp wood—the hissing of a demon orchestra feverishly tuning—masking the smoldering bodies of three children and two women. Discarded at the rim of the pit was a shovel, its sharp edges shining among the leaves.
They traced the shovel to a hardware store in Potomac, Maryland, and records revealed that a Brad Bishop Jr. had purchased it.
The authorities tried to reach Brad Jr. by phone. No answer. They called the State Department and were told to call back in the morning.
Further inquiries by the police to the State Department revealed that Brad Jr. had failed to report to work the previous week. “Oh, he left work last Monday, said he was feeling sick.” No one remembered seeing Annette or Lobelia that week, and the children had not been in school. At their home, the police found a