Even If the Roof Is Falling Down
by Dr. Lorraine Hanlon Comanor, 1963 U.S. ladies championRiches I hold in light esteem
And love I laugh to scorn
And lust of fame was but a dream
That vanished in the morn
-- Emily Bronte, The Old Stoic
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The story of how I came to be on the Sabena passenger list and not on Flight 548 began nine years earlier on a hot, spring afternoon. I was wheezing incessantly, and my mother, a Boston lady with grease paint in her blood, went in search of pollen-free air. Finding no air conditioned movies appropriate for youngsters--the last one we tried featured cannibals and had left me with nightmares--we ended up in a drab, gray building reminiscent of an airplane hangar that housed an ice rink.
We arrived at the Skating Club of Boston after patch, the name given to the hour one practiced figures on one's own individual rectangle of ice, when the free skating session had already begun. Still struggling to breathe, I sat limply in the bleachers, leaning against my mother's shoulder, and only as the cool damp air soothed my constricted air passages did I gradually become aware of the throng of skaters spinning and jumping. Unbeknownst to us, the club was a Mecca for the sport, and two of the skaters we were admiring were Olympians Tenley Albright and Dick Button practicing what I would later learn to name as split jumps, Axels, double flips and flying camels. Performing those tricks would certainly be more entertaining than sitting on the sidelines or going back to our Marlborough Street apartment after school. Besides, how difficult could they be? By the time my breathing had eased, I was begging to skate, and my mother's childhood dreams of starring in the Ringling Brothers circus were taking new directions.
Soon I was tottering around the rink on rented skates and was promised lessons when I could skate backward. "I can do it," I told my mother, as I pushed off with two hands from the boards, blindly aiming for the center of the ice. Unfortunately, shortly after I mastered the two-foot backward wriggle, the club closed for the summer, and I didn't return until the following fall, when a prolonged ragweed season found us once again in search of clear air. I was to have lessons with Cecilia Colledge who had arrived from London with her widowed mother to assume a coaching position with the club. Mrs. Colledge soon became a regular in the top corner of the bleachers, hunching over her knitting and books of foreign verbs, her long, gray coat wrapped around her, as she kept an eye on her daughter's pupils.
When Cecilia skated toward me for my first lesson, I noted a tall, gaunt lady--not a beautiful girl in her early 30s--shivering in a bulky, plaid lumber jacket and baggy, gray slacks. Cecilia, I would learn, was always cold.
"I'm not quite sure what to do with her," she told my mother, as she stood by the edge of the boards and watched my unsuccessful attempt to complete a circle of a figure eight. As a former World champion and rival of Sonja Heine, Cecilia had expected to train promising American athletes not a 6-year-old, decked out in red tights and a red and white bikini bathing suit. "But she does have an edge," she added. That I had progressed beyond standing on the flat of the blade was enough encouragement for my mother to imagine the possibility of a skating career for me.
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Meeting Cecilia's standards was a challenge I often failed. One morning, during our first summer training at Lake Placid, I wobbled so badly on my figure threes and Cecilia was so cross that she stomped off the ice, declaring I was not worth coaching. Before I followed her to the locker room to beg tearfully for another chance, I wet my pants and then had to find a residual puddle on the newly resurfaced ice where I could purposely fall down and cover up the accident. That afternoon, in the privacy of the Adirondack woods, I confided my troubles to my heffalump, my imaginary childhood companion adopted from Winnie the Pooh. When I returned for the 4 o'clock afternoon practice session, my mother, spotting my tear-stained face, said, "You don't have to continue," but I didn't think she really meant it. And I was not ready to admit defeat.
In another lesson, about a year later, Cecilia pretending to be a judge, stood alongside my patch, clipboard and pencil in hand, and, during the third tracing of my double threes, intentionally dropped the pencil close to my path. Squeezing past it was a dicey proposition, but if I ran into it, I would ruin the figure and would surely trip. I stopped. I heard the "tsk" and my eyes traveled from the blue-grey pencil with teeth marks just below its smudged eraser to her grey, knit boot covers. Slowly they ascended their way up her grey wool slacks, grey angora sweater coat, finally reaching her cold, hazel eyes. She turned away before stooping to pick up the pencil and then skated over close enough for me to smell her lily-of-the-valley powder. My insides tightened. I looked for support to the bleachers, where my mother, wrapped in her lamb-skinned coat, was sitting stone-faced. Stopping was a far more grievous offense than I had realized. Cecilia might again decide I was not worth teaching.
"You don't stop," she said. "You go on, even if the roof is falling down."
To the extent my parents would allow it, I would be trained as Cecilia had been. Stories of her intense childhood had been filtered down to me in snippets from Mrs. Colledge, my mother and, eventually, the press. Taken out of school at 7, Cecilia had been privately tutored and coached by Jacques Gerschwiler, a strict Swiss who lived with the Colledges, supervising her every move, monitoring every bite she ate. From the 1928 World Championships, when Mrs. Colledge decided to make her 7-year-old daughter an elite skater, to the outbreak of the war, Cecilia had had six hours of skating lessons a day, as well as dance lessons and painful sessions with a former circus performer, who stretched her on ropes until the blood vessels broke in her eyes, all to make her more flexible.
My training would also extend beyond the rink, although, unlike Cecilia, I stayed in regular school. During the school year, the skating club closed on Mondays, and after classes my mother dropped me off a few blocks from our home at the Colledges third-floor Beacon Street apartment. Cecilia would roll up the shabby Bokhara carpet and demonstrate the choreography for my free skating program, walking me through the steps to Khachaturian's "Masquerade Waltz," the piece she had chosen for my first New England juvenile championships. I had wanted the more ambitious Brahms "Hungarian Dance No. 5," but Cecilia had prevailed, knowing full well I couldn't manage its tempo. As mature skaters, we would be inextricably linked to our music: I to Carmen and West Side Story, Laurence Owen to Symphonie Fantastique, Greg Kelley to Rigoletto, Bradley Lord to Traviata. Eventually we would develop almost impeccable timing. But at 7, I was impatient and invariably got ahead of the music. For the next hour I would sit at the piano by Mrs. Colledge, distracted by her blue-tinted hair, and attempt to nail down Hanon finger exercises and the timing of the Khachaturian score, whose octave-span chords I could barely decipher, let alone reach. This activity was followed by French verb conjugation, with an emphasis on the passé composé, which Mrs. Colledge maintained was the best discipline for the mind.
During the conjugation of être or avoir, my gaze would wander to the picture on the mantel of a handsome, young man in uniform. Maule, Cecilia's brother, was an RAF pilot who had gone missing, purportedly shot down over the North Sea during the Blitz. Since his body had never been recovered, I was sure he could still be alive and that one Monday he would ring the doorbell, a bag of crumpets in hand. Everyone would hug and kiss; Mrs. Colledge would fire up the tea kettle, bring out the Devonshire cream, and the French verbs would be forgotten.
Some months earlier Mrs. Colledge had recommended a four-hour period of piano and verb instruction between the morning and afternoon summer skating sessions. To my mother's credit, she had balked at the full proposed summer program but agreed to the Monday afternoon tutorials. On certain Mondays, I also had ballet lessons with Miss Eleanor, the former lead teacher from the Kirov, who, through gestures and various pronouncements in Russian, attempted to convert my unruly arms into objects that resembled the wings of a swan.
It is not surprising that with all this coaching I started to make my way up the testing and competitive ladders, but I was not always mindful of what I was told and, periodically, there were some impressive screw-ups. As an 11-year-old dark horse at my first national novice competition in Berkeley, I won the first of three school figures, to everyone's surprise. I then ignored Cecilia's instructions of where to place the second. Not about to bury my magnum opus on top of the indicated tracings of previous inferior skaters, I chose a clean piece of ice, unaware that the floor of the rink sloped in that area, and laid down double threes that were a foot out of line. I fell to last place. Aside from some rather terse instructions during practice, my disgusted coach and mother barely spoke to me for the next two days. I spent them eating lemons in the garden of the Claremont Hotel waiting for the free skating, at which time I redeemed myself by flying around "like a bat out of hell," as Cecilia described my performance, ending up a respectable fifth.
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During the school year, the only time we skaters actually played was during the hour and half break between the club's Friday afternoon and evening sessions. Laurence Owen, Greg Kelley and I would run the half mile down Storrow Drive to the WBZ radio station and then cross the road to the race track, climbing the quarter-mile oval fence and heel-toeing it on top of the inch-wide railing to see who could get over the wiggly board the fastest without falling. On the way back to the rink, we would grab a 25 cent ice cream cone at Howard Johnson so we could skip the cod that had been baking all afternoon in the club kitchen, filling the rink with a fish stench. Not once during those times did we ever talk about becoming champions or how we felt when we skated badly, even though Laurence and I shared a burden. Laurence was coached by her famous mother, Maribel Vinson Owen, whose performance in the 1928 World Championships had inspired Cecilia. I had a coach who was a surrogate mother and a mother who was a surrogate coach. For us, there was no escape from a poor showing.
Whether it was due to my mother's long-lost dreams of the flying trapeze or the idea of producing a champion, as my skating progressed, some of her common sense fell by the wayside. When I was 10 and weighed 65 pounds, still too light for a reliable tracing on certain types of ice but a smidge too heavy for that svelte ballerina look, she decided I needed to forgo salad dressing. She came to this conclusion while she tried everything in her power to tempt Cecilia, once dubbed "Fatty" by her mother but who was now just over a 100 pounds at 5'8", to eat. Later that year we fought when I was to be Lady of Spain for the annual "Ice Chips" show in the Boston Garden. My mother's vision of a Spanish Flamenco dancer included a pronounced widow's peak, and the fact that I had a small widow's peak with fuzzy corners did not discourage her. Every week for months she carted me off to an electrolysis salon to remedy the situation. "I don't care about a widow's peak," I told her repeatedly, trying not to cry. But she liked the defined hairline effect so much that, despite my vehement protests about the stinging needles, she kept the weekly appointments for some time after the show.
Notwithstanding my mother's own quirks, she, nevertheless, had reservations about the extremes of Cecilia's childhood experience, especially the stretching on ropes. During our first summer session at Lake Placid, Cecilia pulled a sufficient number of tantrums during her lessons that she was not invited back the following year and ended up in Lynn, a run-down suburb on the North Shore of Boston. Once Cecilia failed to secure a desirable venue for summer training, my parents, especially my father, an advocate of pleasant summers in the country, decided to limit our lessons to the school year, when the Skating Club of Boston was open. While this decision allowed me to spend summers training with other coaches in enviable locations, it was ultimately the undoing of my relationship with Cecilia.
The next two summer training sessions were experimental; I would go to Lake Placid for the first two months, spending only the month of August with Cecilia in Lynn. At the end of the first July, just before my return to Lynn, I took my second test, for which I was border-line prepared, and surprisingly passed. On receiving the results, I ran ecstatically out of the rink to the neighboring hillside, gathered up a bunch of daisies with the earth still dripping off the roots and presented them to one of the judges. I couldn't wait to start my third test figures, which included "loops," but my mother warned me that first day in Lynn to keep on with the second test figures until she had a chance to give Cecilia the news. From my patch, where I was practicing backward serpentines that were still out of line, I kept an eye on my mother talking to Cecilia over the boards.
"Really?" she said with a touch of vinegar. "Who judged?"
That lesson was spent reviewing second test figures; only in the last five minutes did she show me how to do loops.
What I remember most of the second August in Lynn, however, was not how I worked my way back to Cecilia's good graces but what happened to Laurence. Laurence, a great admirer of the floral headbands my mother insisted I wear, had become a surrogate member of our family by begging my mother to French braid what was left of her hair after her mother, Maribel, had taken a bowl to it. Two days after Hurricane Diane, my mother went shopping after our morning practice, leaving three of us skaters at the beach with explicit instructions not to go in the water because of the severe undertow.
Once my mother was out of sight, Laurence, unfazed by the warnings, announced she was bored building sandcastles and insisted on a swim. Unable to dissuade her, my other friend and I watched her bob in the waves for a long time until we realized we were tracking the wrong person. An hour or two later my mother returned to find Laurence missing.
I have many vivid impressions of that afternoon: the whir of the low-flying chopper hovering three feet over the water after the Coast Guard cleared the beach, the silhouette of the amphibious duck dragging the Nahant coastline for her body, the interrogation by the police. Years later, when I read of the melting blades dripping from the Sabena aircraft's crushed aileron, I would see Laurence's loafers, her glasses tucked inside them, alone on the sand, as if they had been painted by Magritte.
After the daylight had faded and the search had been called off, we stood in the beach parking lot, my mother unable to drive back to the rink to tell Maribel that Laurence had been lost. Some minutes later a familiar figure stumbled barefoot down the road. Disoriented without her glasses, Laurence had swum to another beach. My mother pummeled her, and then hugged her before breaking down in a flood of tears. The next morning Laurence appeared at her usual spot in the bleachers for a revision of her French braids. My mother's anger was trivial compared to her own mother's, she explained.
While my mother recovered from the incident, she agreed I would spend a few days with Cecilia who had rented a small house on the Nahant beach. I had had little time with her that was not focused on skating, although during our Lake Placid summer, the three of us had hiked an old Iroquois trail near John Brown's grave. Cecilia and I had run ahead, burying ourselves in the sawdust of an old ice house to hide from my mother. The only other time I remember Cecilia being really silly was when she told me about Maule's collection of crazy car horns, how he liked to creep up to an intersection and blast away with his cuckoo horn at some innocent old soul crossing the road. Perhaps now, outside the rink, she would share more stories.
After practice on the first day of my visit, we strolled along the beach. I got very wet and sandy, collecting hermit crabs in her swim cap. She seemed delighted by them, but on entering her cottage, she promptly ushered me to the bathroom, where she abandoned the crabs in the sink and stripped me before submerging me in the tub. I was mortified. The illusion of a fun-filled visit vanished. I wanted to go home.
In the years to follow, I left the Boston area for the entire summer and, on my return, inevitably faced several weeks of unpleasant lessons, during which I could do nothing right. That I had been away for three months was never mentioned, the absence like a country unlabeled on a map for political reasons. Nevertheless, by the end of September Cecilia and I invariably settled into our usual mix of days when my performance was deemed acceptable and others when it fell far short.
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The final blow came in mid-November. During a crowded afternoon session, in the middle of my free skating program, Cecilia shouted across the ice, "What do you think you are doing going around with your chest stuck out like that? Do you really think you have something to show?" Late developing, I was working hard on a AA bra and felt the eyes of all the boys on my pancake chest. The club Christmas dance was a few weeks off, and Greg had yet to invite me, as he had the year before. Still trying to ignore the remark, I continued into a simple double toe loop and fell. I sat on the ice, unhurt and unable to get up.
Neither my mother nor I spoke during the ride home, but later, from the top of the staircase just outside my room, I heard fragments of my parent's discussion. "She's a mess," my mother told my father. "The gains of this summer--out the window."
My downward spiral monopolized our family's conversation that evening as we lingered after dinner at the dining room table. I had never disintegrated like this before. The persistence of the awful transition period remained a mystery.
"Your big summer improvement was probably just too much for Cecilia," my mother said, folding her napkin. "When she gets in her moods, you need to brush off her remarks like her other pupils do."
"I just can't," I said to my plate, picking at a blighted potato skin, unwilling to admit how dependent I was on Cecilia's approval. It would not have dawned on me to ask her if we could leave my jumps alone and work on other areas that needed improvement. Such a direct approach was not in my armamentarium at the time. Never did I consider the anxiety Cecilia must have felt as her most advanced pupil fell apart.
"There must be other pros," my father said. "You might have to go to New York weekends. Maybe Karli Schäfer would take you."
The few times I had met Karli he had been so enthusiastic I knew I would love skating for him. Still, I thought back to all those Monday afternoons in Cecilia's apartment, to the afternoon in the ice house, the ones at the beach. I couldn't imagine skating without Cecilia; she had been my main coach for half my life. But our relationship had become so uncomfortable that leaving appeared to be the only option. Our divorce was largely a failure of communication, one we never mentioned. Although my mother did not discuss the break-up at length with Cecilia, 10 or 15 years after our parting, the two spoke and Cecilia shared, "I never leave a lesson now without telling a child what positive things we have accomplished."
My mother planned to call Cecilia at 11 the morning after our family meeting to allow her time to absorb the news before afternoon practice. During my 10 o'clock Latin class, instead of concentrating on where Caesar was making camp, I played with the inkwell on my desktop, watching the minute hand on the classroom clock approach 11, thinking I should run out, find a pay phone and call the whole thing off. I could pull myself together, ignore her scathing remarks, bring back what Edi had taught me and start whipping off those double jumps again. But I didn't move. I re-focused on Caesar's next campsite while the clock ticked past 11.
For the first time in seven years, Cecilia did not come to my patch at 3 o'clock, nor did she acknowledge my presence on the ice. Instead, she found her 3:30 pupil at the other end of the rink and started her lesson early. And for the first time in months, she was not wearing the gray hooded angora sweater coat we had given her for Christmas. From the bleachers, my mother watched her shiver in a short-sleeved top before fetching from my locker the heavy Austrian sweater with big, silver buttons that Cecilia had worn as a young skater and had passed on to me.
"It's too hot for that," I said, as my mother handed it over the boards.
"Put it on." I could see by her expression that there was no arguing with her. "If you don't, Cecilia is going to stand there and freeze."
Twenty minutes later, Cecilia disappeared into the locker room and emerged in the angora sweater coat. Then we both went about our business on the same sheet of ice, linked only by our sweaters, Cecilia teaching other skaters, I, well trained in not stopping, practicing by myself, pretending nothing out of the ordinary had happened. From that day until 45 years later, when I visited her in the Brookhaven retirement home, we rarely spoke, and then only to say "hello."
From then on, I commuted weekends to the New York area to train with Karli Schäfer, the former two-time Olympic champion, who, at 50, with a receding hairline and a bit of a pot, was still an icon to me. As much a therapist as a coach, he didn't re-teach me how to jump, but as his little darling, his "schatzi," I started again landing the jumps I had been botching all fall.
While I never became part of the Schäfer household as I had been of the Colledge's, the following summer Karli brought me out of drab East Coast ice arenas to the Stadthalle near his home in Vienna. After practice, he would take his skaters to see Fledermaus at the Volks Oper, to listen to the gypsies play at Neusedlersee, to taste the Heuriger at various Beethoven houses. In August, we drove south to Cortina, where we gathered edelweiss in the Dolomites and ate baccis after long sessions on the ice. It was a time when skating was almost joyful. I was recovering, and by the fall I was ready for serious competition.
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The day before Valentine's Day, when I was to take the train to New York to join the World Team on the evening Sabena flight 548 leaving for Brussels and continuing on to Prague, Winsor's principal phoned my parents with an ultimatum: go to the World Championships and the exhibition tour that followed, and don't return to Winsor. My parents gave me until a few hours before the train left to make the decision. I had never been happy at Winsor; the highly regarded prep school took a dim view of individual sports. On the occasions I made the newspaper, it was duly removed from the library. Nevertheless, I was on track to graduate the following year.
The memory of the next 48 hours is like a series of photographs whose depth of field has been so controlled as to only bring certain objects into sharp focus. That long Valentine's afternoon spent in my room with the door closed is blurred, the conflicting voices that played in my head muffled. There was my own whine of "Why is the world so unfair?" followed by Karli's resonant bass: the exhibition tour would enhance my visibility with European judges, an invaluable asset if I made the World Team next year. Cecilia's repeated pronouncement of "You have your job, the judges have theirs" I did my best to ignore, but in the end, it surfaced. Nothing would override what one produced on the competition day. Three hours before the train left, I emerged tearfully from my room to tell my parents I wouldn't go. My name, however, was not removed from the Sabena passenger list.
I was sleeping fitfully when a reporter woke my father at 5 the next morning with the news that Sabena Flight 548 had crashed an hour earlier while trying to land at the Brussels airport, killing all on board, including his wife and daughter. He apologized for the hour of the call, but he needed an interview. My father purportedly told him to go to hell. My first awareness of the disaster was my mother's screams of "They're dead, they're all dead," as she bounded up the stairs to my room. My immediate reaction was to pull the sheet over my head, not wanting to acknowledge her hysterical exclamations but knowing at some deep level she would not be making up such a story. If my parents hugged me, I don't remember, because, except for the interlude of the next 10 hours, it was the start of a string of days without beginnings or endings that blurred into nights.
"Get dressed," my mother said when she had collected herself and I had finally made it downstairs in my bathrobe to the dining room, where I sat staring out the window at the remnants of black snow on the uneven sidewalk, not even lifting my eyes to the leafless oak that emerged from a small break in the bricks. "You stayed home for school, so to school you will go."
The crash dominated the radio news that morning. Along with 10 others from the Skating Club of Boston, I was originally listed among the dead, but it was soon announced that I had stayed behind.
"Even if the roof is falling down, you go on." Cecilia's voice, ever present, along with an 8-year-old's shame for stopping for a pencil. Do you go on when the lust for fame is up in ashes? When no one is left? I did. For about 10 hours. On I went from class to class, not speaking, not remembering anything said. Many of my classmates were crying, although none knew the other skaters, but neither my teachers nor the principal said a word to me. Not a word. All day. Skating was not an activity on their radar screen. Only as I left the school did the assistant P.E. teacher note that it must be a difficult day.
At the curb, my mother sat waiting in our Plymouth.
"The officials said they may want you to fly to Prague tomorrow for the World Championships," she said, as I climbed into the backseat. Her voice was tight, her mascara smudged. I'm sure she had been crying for all of them but especially for Nathalie Kelley, Greg's older sister and her frequent companion in the bleachers and for Laurence, whose hair she had painstakingly braided and who she had almost once lost. She said Kendall Kelley, from the United States Figure Skating Association, was in Vienna and, instead of meeting the team in Prague, was now on his way to Brussels to identify the bodies. Her statement triggered the first of many recurrent images of the conflagration I would repeatedly try to banish from my mental landscape. Was there anything left besides a pile of ashes to ship home? Did my mother want me to go, now that I would skip the last rungs of the ladder to the top, now that I might actually compete in the World Championships? A little part of me was excited by the prospect. That lust of fame, had it not vanished with the morn?
Mother passed me the usual after-school baloney sandwich, a '50s-style sandwich on white bread with a little iceberg lettuce, mayonnaise and mustard, wrapped in waxed paper and secured with a rubber band. Even though I wasn't hungry, I took the sandwich, thinking of yesterday's identical sandwich, which I had held and eaten in this very backseat when the world was as it was supposed to be.
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We had been separated for more than a year, but I suddenly longed for her presence, the familiar scent of lady-in-the-valley powder, not the scent of of carnations. I wanted her arms around me, her reassurance that the mantra of "Even if the roof is falling down, you go on" did not apply today. But she was not there. No one was. Not even a reporter, hungry for a story. Only my mother and I.
I sat down and unlaced my skates. Perhaps tomorrow I would go on.
Other skaters came to the rink later that afternoon, but none ventured onto the ice. The 1961 World Championships were canceled in deference to the lost American team. The following year I represented the United States at the rescheduled World Championships in Prague and graduated from Winsor. In 1963, I became U.S. champion, and the year after that, I started living life as an ordinary person.
