I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [170]
Lightening the gloom at the NYST was Nutcracker, with children dancing joyfully on the stage while families watched gleefully from the audience. Frank Moncion, as Drosselmeyer, fixed his hair to look like a crown roast and played a goofy, doddering figure—delighting all of us onstage and in the wings. Except Jerry, who hated the interpretation and was livid. Lincoln was furious, as well. The rest of the company cheered. Our pent-up sadness needed a release valve.
The day before Christmas, Carrie brought Balanchine a small tree, encrusted with hanging fruits. She remembered him speaking of his struggling Russian childhood, and how they hung fruit from the branches of their trees, as they had no ornaments.
Early in the morning on December 26, the hospital seemed deserted. “Hi, Mr. B. Is this a good time? I’m on my way to class!” He ignored me. His balance unsure and with trembling legs, he shuffled over to the bathroom and went in, leaving the door ajar. I kept jabbering. “Carrie has a new soup for you. Chris danced last night, he was so great. I rehearsed the NDI children in your tango.11 You can come see it when you get better!” and so on, an avalanche of blather. More shuffling sounds. “You okay in there, Mr. B?” He was standing over the little aluminum sink, with his false teeth in one hand and a toothbrush in the other. He couldn’t manage to clean them; the teeth kept slipping out of his fingers and falling into the sink. “Here, let me do that for you.” Seeming somnambulant, he allowed me to take the teeth and toothbrush. I cleaned, polished, and rinsed his teeth, returned the toothbrush to the plastic cup on the sink, placed his teeth in his hand, turned my back, left the bathroom, leaned against the wall, and wept.
The next day, Tanny in her wheelchair, Carrie, Chris, and I made a quartet in his room. A bit later, the stunning Christine Redpath came by with our chief of wardrobe, Leslie Copeland, aka “Ducky.” We tried to be silly and light. Balanchine proclaimed drolly, with a woeful expression, “There’s no more cabbage in my soup! What’s borscht without cabbage?” We giggled, and debated the virtues of various recipes. “The hell with cabbage, what about beets?” Ducky queried. “They’re more ’ealthy,” he continued, exaggerating his Cockney accent. Tanny piped up, “The hell with the health and the beets, it’s the dollop of sour cream that counts!”
On the way out, Tanny was grim. Angrily, she told Carrie and me, “God should have let George get old, like Churchill or Adenauer. It’s so unfair. He survived a lung operation, giving up smoking, cutting down on drink, a triple bypass, and now this! THIS is to finish him—defeat him? I feel so betrayed. George is losing the ability to see, hear, and communicate.” She speculated that though his illness seemed sudden, several incidents in retrospect made her think that it may have been going on for a long time. “Ten years ago,” she recounted, “George was talking to me about plans for his Audubon ballet, describing a section he envisioned for Diana Adams, called ‘Lady Skunk,’ and described her costume in detail. ‘Very chic.’ Not long after, when I talked about ‘Lady Skunk,’ he looked at me as though I was nuts, as if he had no idea what I was talking about.”
“Tanny,” I commiserated, “it’s a tragedy, his mind is shorting out.” Tanny shot back, her voice hoarse, “That may be a blessing. He isn’t aware that his own legs are worthless. Let’s hope he dies off. Who knows how old he really is, he may be lying. We should feed him lots, get him fat