"Safe in the valley where the wind doesn't blow," my mother said often. Our yearly visit to South Carolina was long anticipated during the winters, and quickly forgotten once we were back and safely snuggled in our little valley where our long redwood house nestled. So I called her Madame Marisha, or Madame M., just as everyone else did. She'd whispered to me once that it would be all right if I called her Mother, but that didn't seem right when I already had a mother whom I loved very much. It was a rule I was never to call her Grandmother when others could overhear and possibly guess her age.
Once she'd been very famous, and not for one second did she let anyone forget this. And thus I would prove to her, and to everyone, that my father had not lived and died in vain.īy no means was my grandmother an ordinary little old lady going on seventy-four. It seemed she wanted almost as much as I did, for me to become the most famous dancer the world had ever known. She was the one who wrote me a letter each week, and once a summer we visited her. In that same southern state, in the town of Greenglenna, lived my paternal grandmother, Madame Marisha. Paul Scott Sheffield, who had been my mother's second husband. Hardly anyone outside of Clairmont, South Carolina, knew about Dr. My own father died before I was born his name was Julian Marquet, and everyone in the ballet world knew about him. I guess one of the saddest things about growing bigger, and older, was that no one was large enough, or strong enough, to pick you up and hold you close and make you feel that safe again.Ĭhris was my mother's third husband. I didn't remember his face nearly as well as I remembered the nice warm and safe feeling he gave me. I remembered a tall man with dark hair turning gray a man who called me his son. The fog was spooky, but it was also romantic and mysterious.Īs much as I loved my home, I had vague, disturbing memories of a southern garden full of giant magnolia trees dripping with Spanish moss. The fog would roll in in great billowing waves and often shrouded the landscape all day, turning everything cold and eerie. There was a redwood forest on the other side of the mountains, and the ocean too. We lived in Fairfax, Marin County, about twenty miles north of San Francisco. To reach my home I had to travel a winding narrow road without any houses until I came to the huge deserted mansion that invariably drew my eyes, making me wonder who had lived there why had they deserted it? When I saw that house I automatically slowed, knowing soon I'd be home.Īn acre from that house was our home, sitting isolated and lonely on a road that had more twists and turns than a puzzle maze that leads the mouse to the cheese. Whenever Dad didn't drive me home from school, a yellow school bus would let me off at an isolated spot where I would recover my bike from the nearest ravine, hidden there each morning before I stepped onto the bus.
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