13 Chapter 12 The Swans

Chapter 12 The Swans When Maria was forty-one years old, she realized her time in the spotlight was ending. She was watching a young dancer in rehearsal lift her leg higher and higher. The dancer's balance was off, and Maria corrected her. The girl was so eager to please, so hungry to learn. Maria thought with surprise, Why, that was me a lifetime ago!

Practically all her life, Maria had been dancing. If she stopped, what would she do? A whole new generation of young girls were just now tying on their toe shoes for the first time. Perhaps she could teach them what Madame Nijinska and George Balanchine had taught her—passion and discipline. Still, the thought of being "retired" frightened her. Backstage, whenever she had felt nervous, Maria had lifted her chin and stepped forward to show the world what she could do. Was it time

now to show the world again what she could do as a teacher? The decision tormented Maria. "Should I... or shouldn't I?" she asked herself over and over again. When Elise was younger, Maria took her on tour with her. In the hotel rooms late at night, Elise set out plates of food for her mother. Sometimes, if she wasn't too tired after a performance, Maria draped a silk scarf over the lamp to create a soft glow, and she read to Elise. Once, Elise had written a poem that began:

Because she is my mother, every night she turns into Cinderella. After the final performance of a tour in Venezuela in 1966, Maria returned to her hotel room alone. Buzz and Elise were not waiting in the wings. They were home in Chicago. Maria longed to be with them. That night, she made up her mind. It was time she stopped turning into Cinderella. A few days later, Maria returned to her family in Chicago and left the stage for good. She began to build a new life for herself. She made a studio on the top floor of her house and gave herself lessons each day. She began to work with performers at the Chicago Lyric Opera and later, helped to begin the Chicago City Ballet. All along,

she never lost touch with her closest friend, George Balanchine. In 1983, Maria received a frightening telephone call. George was in the hospital. Maria flew to New York City. As she hurried down the hall toward George's hospital room, Maria felt as if her life was about to change again. George had created a golden age of ballet in America, and she had been part of it. "I couldn't imagine the world without him," she confessed. Maria entered the room and drew a chair close to his bedside. George was too weak to sit up, but he smiled when he saw Maria. A short while later, the nurse asked her to leave. Maria knew she would never see George again.

Soon after George died, Maria wrote, "The ballet world in which I grew up is gone." In the years that followed, Maria found joy in new experiences: her daughter's success as a writer, walks along Lake Michigan in Chicago or along the beach in Florida. Although she no longer performed publicly after 1966, she never put away her toe shoes. Each day, she gave herself a class at the barre. Sometimes she taught. When Maria was seventy-one years old, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., named her "one of the outstanding artists of the twentieth century." Many in the world of ballet believed