I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [173]
Eddie Bigelow was at my shoulder. Stuffed into a tall, bony frame with a surly exterior was the heart of a caring, loving man. I reflected—Eddie was there, in thrall to Balanchine and Lincoln, from the earliest days of Ballet Society in 1946. Eddie performed in anything and everything, and was a lifelong servant to dance and dancers. Eddie—filling in for injured corps de ballet dancers; acting the character roles, the monster roles; holding a banner at the back of the stage in Firebird; fixing costumes; running errands; dyeing shoes; carrying injured dancers to the hospital—Eddie could always be counted on. If you needed a moving man, Eddie carried your furniture up and down stairs. A chef? He would cook giant pots of spaghetti, supply the vodka, Chianti, or scotch, and argue with you incoherently for hours, rambling off lots of words that sounded like they meant something, but we never could zero in on what his subject was. We loved to play cards together … canasta, poker, bridge. God bless him. In service his whole life! Behind the scenes Eddie and the self-effacing Betty Cage gave their love, labors, and most of their lives to the ballet company. They should have their Oscars, along with Balanchine and Lincoln.
Suzanne Farrell, white-faced and sheathed in black, stood near the coffin, holding lilies in her arms, like Albrecht in Giselle.
The young, imposing Father Adrian, standing over six feet tall, officiated from the altar. He had been Balanchine’s priest. Russian liturgy echoed off the walls, intoned by Father Adrian and answered by the many Russians in the church. The power of ritual, communally shared, is meant to establish an architecture of order and become a road to healing, yet throughout the ceremony all I registered was the murmuring and the subdued sobs of those around me, as if my brain heard only the bass line of an orchestra. The presence of deep sorrow generates loss, fearfulness, and even anger. The only comfortable person present and at peace was the deceased.
In my unease, my mind wandered and focused on Bigelow, imagining him in the role he created in the ballet La Valse: cloaked in black velvet, white pancake makeup on his face, black circles under his eyes, a shadow of Death; a timeless presence overlooking Balanchine in his coffin.
The high point in the British 1949 movie of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades takes place at the funeral for the old Countess Ranevskaya. The army engineer, Hermann, who brought about her death, leans over the open coffin to kiss her forehead, and her eyes pop open!
Then, I heard it. A little sniff. Didn’t anyone else hear it? It came from Balanchine. One nostril, a slight twitch. Didn’t anyone else see it? I saw it! And then another, and then his mouth twitched. A woman near the coffin began gasping, backing up. Balanchine sitting up! Screams! Bodies paralyzed, frozen with disbelief. Others scrambling to get away. Balanchine was looking around. I pushed my way through the backing multitudes to embrace him. And he announced, “I was sleeping …”
The service was reaching its end, and lights faded on the stage. Many of us stayed, lined up to approach Balanchine on his bier. At my turn, I stepped up, touched his hand, petted it, really, tears dripped off my cheek. I leaned over to kiss his forehead. Luckily, I did not drip on his face. What did I expect? Balanchine’s forehead to be cold on my lips! It was warm.
Leaving the church, Shaun told me that Danilova didn’t cry at Balanchine’s funeral because, she claimed, “Makeup and tears don’t mix.”
Carrie, Chris, and I joined Tanny and her buddy, the boyish-looking Randy Bourscheidt, New York City’s deputy commissioner for cultural affairs. We packed ourselves into a limousine, supplied by Nancy Lassalle for Tanny’s use, and followed the cortege, a line of black beetles traveling in limbo-land along the right lane of the Grand Central Parkway. We were being drawn toward Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor, New York,