If they wanted to extend the fantasy, Carolyn and Grace would walk over to the Russian Tea Room on Fifty-seventh Street, with its mural of the ballerinas of the Ballet Russe in Les Sylphides and Swan Lake on every side. At the neighboring tables, they could hear the chatter of Russian émigrés, exiled by revolution and war. And if they stayed late enough after one of the performances, they might glimpse Mr. Balanchine himself, walking in through the glass doors of the restaurant with a ballerina on either arm, at which point the entire room would erupt in applause.
For two girls in love with the ballet, New York in 1948 was a wonderful place. The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo was still based in Manhattan, as it had been since the war. The Ballet Theatre was at Rockefeller Center. The film The Red Shoes had just opened its run at the Bijou Theatre on Forty-fifth Street. Grace and Carolyn went as soon as they could, their eyes swimming with the new Technicolor, with its vivid greens, reds, and blues. Growing up in Steubenville, Carolyn had always wanted to take dance classes, but her stepfather wouldn’t allow it. He put his foot down, said they didn’t have the money to waste. Now that she was in New York, Carolyn had her own money and could spend it as she wished. She signed up for classes in the Balanchine method at a nearby dance school and started going to weekly classes. She loved her lessons, the teacher’s insistence on precision and control. She learned that a simple stretch of the foot and leg—a tendu—wasn’t just an isolated movement; it was part of an artistic journey that expressed something about how you felt. You practiced the same stretch over and over, pointing your toe directly ahead of you, then to the side and behind, dozens of times, until the movements became second nature.
In classes, Carolyn moved well; she had a natural grace. She thought about dancing professionally, but her teachers warned her it was already too late. She had just turned twenty, and most dancers of a similar age had been training for a decade or more. So Carolyn took what she had learned and applied it to her work as a model. By November of 1948, when she was photographed by Francesco Scavullo for a six-page feature in Seventeen wearing a party dress of velvet and rayon taffeta, her tiny waist nipped by a bow, she stands with a dancer’s carriage, her leg positioned elegantly behind her in a perfect tendu.
CHAPTER 6
Nina
Whereas my mother was always there with me when I was growing up, like the waters of the Sound with its thin strip of beach, my father was like the weather: he came and went, and you never knew how it would be tomorrow.
Like so many other fathers of his generation, he was almost completely uninvolved in anything to do with his children. I don’t remember him ever going to a parent-teacher conference, or helping me with my schoolwork, or even commenting on the fact that I was so often at home sick in bed. During the week, he stayed in the city, and on the weekends, when he came home, he spent most of his time next door with his friend Sherman. He was much older than my mother, entering his fifties when I was born. It was as if he inhabited another world, one filled with his own interests, work, and social activities; a world that had nothing to do with my mother’s chores, with children, or with the slow ticking clock of our days.
It’s hard for me to remember any more than a handful of instances when my father paid me any real attention during my childhood. I usually kept quiet, didn’t make a fuss like my sisters, and as a result, I rarely caught his interest. Occasionally, he would allow me to come and sit with him in the den to watch TV. Here he had a special storage unit for his beloved RCA television set, including a wooden tray that slid out that he had designed himself. I would sit on the dark blue corduroy-covered sofa, and he would sit opposite, sunk deep into his comfortable black chair, in front of his fully stocked bar and his library wall with his books, watching the flickering color TV.
On the walls of the den, my father hung his collection of paintings and reproductions from his family archives. He was originally from Georgia, and despite spending most of his adult life in the North, he maintained his accent and his pride in his southern heritage. (According to my father, our Georgian ancestors were responsible for bringing peaches to the United States.) I remember a print of George Washington Crossing the Delaware that hung in a thick gilt frame above the couch. Then there was the black-and-white photo of a steamboat, the Major Philip Reybold, built by one of my father’s ancestors in the 1850s. The story went that one stormy night the steamboat was out on the Delaware River when it was struck by a tornado and the ship’s silver bell was lost. According to local legend, whenever severe weather threatened
