In the Shadow of Parsenn Lorraine Hanlon Comanor (bio) The wicked dance in which you are caught up will last many a little sinful year yet, and we would not wager much that you will come out whole. —The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann My final year of skating I lived in a Swiss village at the base of Parsenn, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. The town became the hub of my existence, not only a geographical center from which I traveled to shows and competitions, but a place of self-reckoning. The day I was forced to leave, I took with me a Bavarian doll, a book of pressed wildflowers, a collection of German texts, and two black-and-white photographs: one of old folks streaming up the hill to the thirteenth-century Frauenkirche, the other of the Höhenweg, a path I used to take to Parsenn. Today the German texts sit in my bookcase behind the doll, waiting to be reread. The photos hang in my bedroom, the first thing I see in the morning and the last at night. A last practice session in the London suburb of Richmond with my new Swiss trainer, Arnold Gerschwiler. Then a flight to Zürich, a cab to the Bahnhof, a train to Landquart, and a change to the narrow-gauge Rhätische Bahn to climb the fifteen hundred meters to Davos. A four-hour train ride in 1962. I brought along a German grammar. Our first stop on arrival was the outdoor regulation rink surrounded by Alps in their full summer glory, cows grazing in the high pastures. The town had wanted an elite figure skater, and after the 1962 World Championships, the mayor had invited me to be its guest. At sixteen I had trouble believing that I was going to train in this alpine paradise. With the exception of two months’ outdoor work in Cortina, a town in the Dolomites, I’d mostly practiced in buildings that resembled airplane hangars. Mother watched from the sidelines as I completed a set of brackets, making sure I was taking full advantage of my recent lessons, incorporating all the changes Arnold had made to my school figures. This new trainer, she hoped, would help me make the leap from the second American girl to the US figure skating champion. Unlike in Cortina, there was no retractable curtain here to shade the ice from the alpine sun. I struggled to make out my tracing in the glare. After I’d completed a set of brackets, she beckoned me over to the boards. If I would carry my weight just a tad further back, my skate would run better. [End Page 78] What did she know about how to stand on a blade? She was a painter. In a few days, she’d return to our Boston home, and I’d be completely on my own. I’d had the lecture on chastity and distractions, the former something to keep, the latter—presumably romantic involvement—something to avoid. I’d listened dutifully. I was used to her continual presence in the bleachers, her reiteration of my mistakes at dinner while she admonished me to sit up straight. After three hours of continuous pulling up, forcing my shoulders back, I liked nothing better than to slouch at the table. But aside from my delight at the prospect of being on my own in a picture-book town, part of me was in a shadow, recovering from the previous year’s disaster. The crash of Sabena Flight 548 in Brussels had killed all seventy-two on board and decimated the US Figure Skating Team. Of the thirty-four skaters, parents, coaches, and officials on the flight, nine were from Boston. But for a last minute ultimatum from Winsor, my elite private school, I would have been on board too. My name had not even been removed from the passenger list. From the patchwork quilt of days that followed, beginning with the 5 a.m. reporter’s call to my father asking for an interview and at the same time informing him of his wife’s and daughter’s deaths, what I mostly...