Four months have gone by, and Graves seems to have turned a corner.
She bought a house west of Paris to be with Thomas, and is in the process of moving there. Her mother, Dorothy Graves-Kenner, agreed to travel with her daughter, helping her care for Ella while Graves performs.
Ella was born to Denyce Graves in June, after an emergency C-section in Paris. "It was a gift, a miracle," Graves says.
(Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)
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When Graves-Kenner looks at her daughter now, she says, she sees "a more mature, seasoned person. She's always been disciplined, but now she's a little bit older. I see her as well rounded."
Her mother's help doesn't relieve the diva of the challenges and stresses of motherhood.
"Did I tell you I pumped 23 bottles of milk before I left for one trip?" Graves tells the hairdressers backstage while getting her wig touched up last week, drawing peals of laughter. "You know how much that hurts?"
She also brought Ella to rehearsals. The infant, sitting on her grandmother's lap, was transfixed, watching her mother with the rest of the cast a few feet away.
"There's my girl! There's my girl!" Graves cooed.
Ella hiccupped.
A night or two later, Graves is sitting in her dressing room in the Kennedy Center, the same building where she heard opera for the first time and, as a child, longed to be sitting just where she is now. She is wearing an orange robe and partial makeup, waiting for rehearsals to begin. The door is closed. It is quiet -- she is the only one in the actors' hallway -- and, for a moment, the rest of the world seems far away.
There is her reflection in the mirror: smooth skin, high cheekbones, and, beneath the makeup, a tilt of the jaw and an edgy light in the eyes. There is a flicker of a smile, not that of an ingenue.
Denyce Graves, at 40.
