The Short History of a Prince (10 page)

“Sit down, why don’t you, Linda,” Walter said, taking the child by the hand and helping her onto the sofa. “While you’re thinking about where you put that art project, I want to show you something. That’s right, you get settled, and here, give me that headband, if you don’t mind.”

Linda watched without a word while Walter first stretched the band and then fit it on his head. “Your great-aunt, Sue Rawson—you remember, the tall old lady who looks like an endangered bird—she used to take me to the ballet when I was little and it pretty much changed my life. She was always changing my life, if you want to know the truth.” He adjusted the band again, so it wouldn’t pinch behind
his ears. “Now,” he said, “picture that I’m a swan, a cygnet. Little swans in ballet are called cygnets, which is something you will have to know about if you’re going to be a ballerina. A cygnet is the greatest thing you can be when you’re a dancer.”

He was wearing khaki shorts, his blue paisley boxers sticking out above his belt in the back, black leather tennis shoes, green socks and a matching green T-shirt. “I’m at a disadvantage, Linda, because I’m minus the three other swans in this dance of the four cygnets from
Swan Lake
, and also I don’t have a tutu like yours. Don’t close your eyes, don’t do that, but use your imagination anyway.” He hummed a few bars of the music, broke to explain how the four dancers were linked up, arms hooked together in a basket weave, and then he did the entrechats, jumping in place, and retiré, bent leg, foot pointed at the knee, and head to the right, down, and to the left. “In
Swan Lake,”
he said, already panting as he did the jumps, “these swans are girlfriends. They’re happy in this dance—but whatever they feel during the ballet, they are together—together in their happiness, and their misfortune, and their beauty. A lot of people like me, not just dancers, but fellows like me—happen to know and love this ballet and especially this variation. I got into big trouble once doing a scene from the third act—but that’s another story.

“Anyway,” he puffed, “there’s a prince, Prince Siegfried, and it’s his birthday, and his mom is going to make him choose a wife. She’s going to throw a party for him and invite all of the prettiest girls and he’s going to have to marry one of them. So he’s in a really bad mood. He goes out to the lake—which is what I always do when I’m depressed—you can do it too, when you’re older and sad—and in this peaceful glade he sees the most spectacular creature. Her face is half covered in swan feathers, and her white dress is made of this soft—downy swanny stuff.”

He was going to have to start an exercise regime once he got settled in Otten. He was breathing heavily, but Linda was smart, of course she was, and she was getting the idea. “And, naturally,” he went on, “the prince falls in love with this bird-girl. She sees him and she’s scared out of her ever-loving mind—she thinks he’s going to shoot her and have her for Thanksgiving—”

“Walt,” Lucy said, appearing in the arch between the living room and the entry, “what are you doing?”

He continued to move, hopping on one foot, his leg stretched behind him, head down, one arm to the side, the other in front of him. “I took your mother—to see—
Swan Lake
—when she was eight, Linda,” he sputtered. “She doesn’t remember. Sometimes—that’s all I want to ask of her—that she remember.” He continued hopping, head to the left, down and to the right. “Am I being overly dramatic?” He gasped. “It was with Makarova—one of the greatest ballerinas—Russia—and the world—for that matter—has ever produced. Do you notice the plié—that bend Melissa was teaching you—it’s about the most basic movement there is. In this four-minute dance—there are about fifty thousand plies. Eddie Villella—my friend Susan’s ballet master—believes that the battement tendu—the pointing of the foot—the stretching outward of the leg—is the way to Nirvana—but I differ with him—I prefer the plié as my personal route to the—”

“I do remember,” Lucy said. “You wouldn’t buy me Jujyfruits at intermission. You gave me a long speech about how movies could be about food
and
the movie, all at the same time, but that the ballet was separate from the body, that going to the ballet was—spiritual, I think you said, and did not mix with Jujyfruits. Sue Rawson probably never let you have candy when she took you to the ballet and so for you it was like a rule or something, a commandment.”

His left leg, at that moment, extended in a knobby arabesque, came slowly to meet his supporting leg. He stood breathing out of his mouth, his headband antenna quivering. She had twisted her hair into a French knot, so that she looked grown-up, womanly. “A commandment?” he said. There was sweat running down his forehead, dripping off his brows. He balled his fists and rubbed his eyes.

“You don’t have to start crying,” she said, holding out a frosted glass of lemonade to him. “I got over it. All those people onstage running around made me hungry, that’s all. Take this and drink. And yes, I do remember
Swan Lake
. The—couple, or whatever they are, die in the end, but you’re supposed to be happy for them. I’ve got some lemonade for you too, honey,” she said to Linda. “Just think, Walt, if your students could see you now, they’d transfer right out of freshman English into Shop. If they could see you, what would they think?”

Walter looked up to the ceiling, wished for a double Manhattan and then took a long cool drink of his sister’s brew, made from a powder
of sugar and lemon flavor. He had temporarily forgotten that he was going to be a high school English teacher. “Oh well,” he said lightly, “Freshman English is a requirement. You can’t transfer out of it.” His sister meant no harm, he knew. She had propriety to think of, her daughter’s moral upbringing as well as her husband to protect. He was getting uppity on her own turf, and she couldn’t condone it. Her reaction was understandable. But if he was ever the instrument of revenge, if he was ever going to have magical and evil power over her, he knew how he would use it. He would wave his wand, and presto, little Linda would grow up to be exactly like their aunt Sue Rawson.

Three

OCTOBER
1972

B
y October Daniel had already had two operations, both to remove small growths. Mrs. Gamble suspected the worst the day the family went to Lake Margaret, when she’d crept up to Daniel’s room, and stood outside, six inches from the door, her arms crossed on her chest, listening. She thought she heard a noise, a sizzling sound, like an apple baking in an oven, the thin red skin stretching and splitting. Her hand flicked to the white wood of the door. It fell open. She held her breath and craned her short neck to see around the corner. The boy was asleep, his head turned on the pillow, so that she had a panoramic view of the protrusion. It had the look of something hard, unforgiving, nothing that would grow soft or oozy, the poison finally draining off. She believed that it was still in progress, continuing to enlarge while the parents drove off to celebrate the marriage of the grocer and his Mrs. Hoity-toity.

A week after the party Daniel was admitted to the hospital for the removal of the lump. Mrs. Gamble did not need to be told that it was malignant. She had seen it. Over the back fence Joyce thanked her for her concern, and the basket of vitamins, and said only that Daniel was much better. In September, another tumor had grown under his armpit, appearing overnight, like an egg left in a nest. At the beginning,
Dr. Blume did not know, or would not say, the name of the illness. Although the tumors were cancerous, Joyce and Robert found several reasons to be hopeful. Daniel would have radiation and chemotherapy in a fine teaching hospital in Chicago. He was young and in good shape. It might be nothing that had caused the swellings; they might be isolated freaks of nature. Joyce dreamed that the growths had come from outside her son, carelessly slapped on Daniel by an invisible hand.

By the first of October Daniel had already missed three weeks of his senior year of high school. Walter knew very little about his brother’s sickness, but it crossed his mind once that in all of Daniel’s spare time he might be thinking about the clang of death’s door, the path to heaven, the silence along that unimaginable road. It was what a feverish person might dwell on during the long, empty day. Walter thought about his brother abstractly and without much concern. Both before he had gotten his tonsils out, and in recovery, he’d been afraid his heart would stop, and so it wouldn’t have surprised him if Daniel too had worried about croaking on the table. The odds were against it, of course. Worldwide someone died every few seconds, but in America, in Oak Ridge, the odds were generally against death.

Walter’s friend Mitch Anderson occasionally spoke about a mind-control program his mother swore by, for health and success, but Walter had never tried either her technique or regular positive thinking to cure his common viruses. What was the point in exerting effort when the twenty-four-hour flu would pass in its own good time? He figured that if he ever had a real disease he would rise to the occasion and think, think like crazy about sunshine and wanton gaiety. He’d watch the Marx Brothers movies, learn to play the piano like Chico, laugh doubled over, holding both his sides. Whatever Daniel had was surely going to pass without the need of Mrs. Anderson’s present enthusiasm. Once Daniel was better there might be a memento that would stay with him, Walter supposed, the pink welt of a scar, the cavity inside where the tumors had been, a severed nerve—something that would throb or itch when he was older, to warn him of rain or frost.

In the late afternoons Daniel sat in the rocking chair in the living room, convalescing, an afghan over his shoulders, another for his lap.
He sat in that old-man pose in his chair, before dinner, looking up the street. He watched Walter coming home, the kid brother walking along Maplewood Avenue with his feet turned out like a ducks. Daniel’s throat was sore, and sometimes it was hard to get simple words out, even so little as a Hello, hello, Walter.

At the Hendersons’ lawn Walter could see Daniel in the window. It was then, almost home, that Walter suddenly and briefly felt sorry for his brother. He put his head down and came quickly. It seemed to him that Daniel had never before been alone, and there he was, glaringly separate from the rest of them because of a few morbid growths. It wasn’t the vague disease that disturbed Walter; it was Daniel’s forlornness that sent a shock through him. He couldn’t stand seeing the desolation in his brother, the sort of quiet wretchedness that had previously been Walter’s province. Concentrate, Daniel, Walter willed. Think of your long future: swimming for the gold, a contract with a sportswear company, a college sweetheart. He tried to imagine the girl, her even teeth, her shy nature, her madras culottes, her fair-sized knockers beneath her buttoned-up cardigan. When he got to the Gambles’ property Daniel came into focus, a gaunt teenager with jaundice, a person who would frighten a child, a boy who looked like a poetic horror, a Boojum. It was an embarrassment to have to face someone whose luck for the time being had unaccountably failed him. Walter went up the stairs without hearing his brother’s raspy hello. The word was stuck halfway up Daniel’s throat, and by the time the last syllable came out of his mouth Walter was on the second floor, shutting his bedroom door.

That fall it seemed to Walter that the house had the fake hush of a funeral home, the music turned low in the living room, Joyce and Robert tiptoeing along the hall, so formal with each other, Robert opening the front door for the neighbors and their casseroles, his gentleman’s gestures, his friendly welcome, muted. The change had come after the second surgery. The people in the McCloud family were like acquaintances, Walter thought, boarders who shared a bathroom and happened to eat together. Within the house they had apparently been released from their old selves and merely because one person was temporarily sick. There was no trace of the reliable characters they had once been, and no clue about the new and presumably improved
selves to come. The large foil-wrapped pots of purple and yellow mums on the end tables in the living room, gifts from Aunt Jeannie, were the only things that seemed to have any chat in them. She blew in once a day, and everyone, even the dog, took cover. When Robert stayed late at his factory, Joyce sat in the window-seat of her bedroom staring at the sky, without moving, like a Yogi. Walter wondered, years later, if by October Daniel understood the nature of his illness. He came to believe that while he was off at his sophomore year of high school memorizing the periodic table, reading
The Grapes of Wrath
and the highlights of
The Peloponnesian War
, Daniel was doing the optional work that all good students of death, all goners, undertake. He was preparing. It was as if he had already grown up and left them.