The Short History of a Prince (11 page)

Four afternoons a week and on Saturday mornings, Walter rode the el train from Oak Ridge to the Loop in Chicago for his ballet class. Susan and Mitch sat in one seat, their arms around each other, and Walter sat behind them, or in front of them, or across from them. The handsome couple might have passed for brother and sister if they hadn’t usually been in each other’s lap. Their eyes were the same quality of blue, they were slender and they both had a graceful, erect carriage. Mitch, for everyday purposes, had the confident I’m-beautiful gait of a runway model. Susan’s hair was a silver blond and Mitch’s the yellow of straw. He parted his mane on the side and the long fine strands fell across his eyes every time he moved. He habitually flicked his head. Walter thought, Your Highness, each time Mitch made the gesture.

On the train, suspended between the luxuriant green world of Oak Ridge and the unending pavement of the city, Walter was always aware of Mitch’s taunt. Susan might lean against her boyfriend, or kiss his cheek, or stroke his hand, and then, invariably, Mitch flicked that gorgeous head of his. He kept it where the movement landed him, to show off his profile to Walter, and slowly he combed through his hair with his first two fingers. He’d finally turn, and look straight across to Walter. It was in part the size of the blue iris, the roundness of the eye, and the heavy lids that made Mitch’s face notable. A showstopper.
He fixed his gaze on Walter as the train lurched forward and moved slowly on.

There wouldn’t have been much of a message in a quick glance. For Walter, time gave the look meaning, the stretch along the tracks between Cicero and Pulaski. Mitch hardly blinked and he didn’t move his hands or his feet. The sly smile was set. It was as if the boy was becalmed. But in the stillness he was saying to Walter,
I have this great girl on my arm, something you’ll never have. See the way she fawns
—
I can sit here motionless and she fawns! She can’t get enough of me; she’ll do anything to make me show signs of life. Anything!

The train passed the housing projects on the West Side of Chicago, passed the boarded-up schools, the burned-out lawns, the rusty jungle gyms, the few garden plots in the narrow fenced-in backyards. The ghetto flashed in a blur while Mitch stared at Walter, while Susan tickled her quarry’s earlobes and cheek, her manicured nails moving circles over the ruddy skin of his permanent Irish blush. The red lacquer made Walter shiver. Even if her hands were folded on her lap the sight of the nails gave him goose pimples.

Once, at the Halsted station, Susan sat in Mitch’s lap whispering at his neck while a pickpocket was arrested three cars up. Walter pulled on the sleeve of his own corduroy jacket to keep himself in his seat, to prevent a humiliating moment. He might shout, against his will. What happened to love if it wasn’t collected, he wanted to know, if it wasn’t received? He might ask this question out loud. He might stand and go from commuter to commuter down the aisle, asking each one what he thought about the old unsolved problem that science and mathematics had never tackled and literature and the opera only fleetingly illuminated: Where, he’d ask, does love go? He felt as if his skin were porous, that love was gaseous, leaking out of him, a cloud of stink everywhere he went. It was an element with alchemic properties, sometimes, according to its mood, sweet, heavy, lustrous. The minute it hit the air Walter imagined it became deceptively light, something unseen, like a tubercle bacillus, passing from person to person, taking each one from health to either heaven or hell. Mitch’s head was thrown back, his mouth slightly open, Susan trying to sleep on his shoulder. She had her hand on his collarbone, on that graceful curving truss, as if she owned the thing. Walter kept his seat and looked at
of
The Golden Bowl
, the page he’d been reading since he’d boarded the train.

He half believed, in that year, with only occasional relief from his own fresh pessimism, that love was capable of killing a person, and that even a worm, digesting the particularly bitter juices, could distinguish a corpse dead from love. But there were moments, riding the el, walking the school halls, eating lunch, when he felt as if he were singing, singing without realizing. It didn’t seem impossible that he might suddenly become an enormous woman belting out a heartbreaking Puccini aria—
Folle amore!
He was screaming at the top of his lungs, wasn’t he?
Folle ebbrezza!
How could it be that Mitch was not receiving any of those musical strains? And where did the noise of the shriek, the smell of leaking gas, the melody, the words Lauretta sings, “Have pity, have pity”—where did all of that matter go when it was not absorbed by the loved one?

They walked up Michigan Avenue, the three of them linking arms, Susan between, a phalanx against the wind that swept off the lake. Walter held his collar closed and adjusted his earmuffs. Mitch never wore a hat. He jerked his head, his single defense against the freezing temperatures. If they had time they went to the Artists’ Café and drank weak coffee, emptying all of the cream from the pitcher into their cups. They often discussed the problem of the ego and the artist, the artist with the ego, the importance of the ego to the artist, the difficulty of maintaining an ego of healthy proportion, and the possibility of peaceably quelling an erupting ego. They couldn’t drive or vote or buy beer but they were virtually adults, they felt, drinking coffee, and discussing the nature of the ego, the id, the artist. Walter usually managed to recite a scrap of verse. He had absorbed some lines of Christopher Morley from Sue Rawson and was able to say, “ ‘When ego, fantailed like a peacock, can find the needle in the haycock’—something, something, something, ‘is that millennium?’ ”

“Walter,” Susan said, after he had been spouting Morley, “if you break your leg in seven places, God forbid, and can’t dance, you’d be a great English teacher. You know so much more than Mr. Reynolds.”

He felt a burst of love for her years later, when he remembered the conversation. She had allowed him an easy out, a shattered leg in
order to get on to a viable profession. At the time he tried to muster a visible shudder. Mr. Reynolds? Mr. Reynolds! The flamer in his prissy bow tie, his yellow shirt, emerald-green blazer, pleated pants, silky off-white ribbed socks, polished loafers outfitted with brand-new pennies? Walter got his shoulders to twitch. He would never have gone so far as to say that he liked Mr. Reynolds or admired him, but he did have a secret sympathy for his teacher. It was true that he had more poetry committed to memory than Mr. Reynolds, and that he knew little-used words such as callipygian, long before it was the MTV word of the day, but deep down Walter was rooting for the man.

Mitch twittered into his coffee. “Great goal, Suze, to be like Mr. Reynolds.”

“I
said
, Walter knows a lot more than Mr. Reynolds.”

Walter, warming to the idea of himself standing at a podium speaking passionately, began to quote from
Howards End
. “ ‘Life is indeed dangerous,’ ” he recited, “ ‘but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.’ ”

“See?” Susan said, wagging her head at Mitch.

“I know I’ve been saved by books,” Walter went on, ignoring them. “I mean literally saved, and I suppose it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to try to help people understand that books have that sort of power. That, ah, redemptive power, if you will.” He was pleased with himself, by the fact that he was already quite capable of speaking like an English teacher.

“Yeah,” Mitch said, still sniggering, “but Mr. Reynolds?”

They went into the Louis Sullivan Building, into the dim entry that years before had been stately. The marble was scuffed, the brass had dulled, and the gold leaf was gone. Harry, the elevator man, sat slumped on his stool, holding his lever. He was sleeping, his head resting right next to the emergency button, while he waited for passengers. When Mitch stepped in, Harry opened his eyes and began to mutter, seamlessly coming out of his dream into the world of motion and small talk. He took them up to the twelfth floor, his head bowed, talking as he did, day after day, into his stomach, no matter the season,
about the bitter weather, the merciless wind. With one lever he drove the metal cage up, slowed and slowed, adjusted, up, up, an inch, another inch, so that finally it met the floor.

The hall on twelve was lit by one lightbulb, and so the corners were suitable for last-minute fondling. Susan and Mitch kissed under the dusty panel depicting the birth of Venus. Walter opened the door to the waiting room, to the smell of sweat and rosin, cigarette smoke, the tinny noise of the piano from inside the studio, the thump of forty girls jumping, landing on the same last beat.

If life for Walter was composed in part of confusion, shame and deception, the ballet was order, dignity and forthright beauty. He could come from the train, from the outside world of his brother’s sickness, his own strife and Mitch’s cruel taunt, into the studio to the realm of the dance. He could stand behind Mitch at the barre, in fifth position, pulling up his puffy knees with all of his strength, so that they would stand as flat as possible against each other, and stretching his scrawny leg, pointing his long slab of a foot in a battement tendu, he could say, with each movement,
I love you, Mitch
. Their teacher, Mr. Kenton, snapped his fingers and walked the studio, adjusting a student’s arm, a neck, a hand, an entire leg. The pupil always nodded, to display understanding and gratitude. And one, and two, and three, and four. On one, Walter pointed his foot in front of him,
I love you, Mitch
, and two, close to the fifth position,
I love you, Mitch
, and three, à la seconde,
I love you, Mitch
, and four, close to the fifth,
I love, I love you, Mitch
.

When they turned around to the other side, to do the exercise on the right leg, Walter was in front of Mitch. He didn’t look at the girls along the barre. He closed his eyes and saw Mitch, Mitch in every detail: Mitch’s thighs that tapered elegantly to the knee, the slight bulge of his calf, his short feet that were so arched they looked as if they could snap shut. He remembered how Mitch had stared at the ceiling once, with his hand on his throat, how he listened when Walter played Schumann on the piano. He was sure that Mitch was listening intently. And he thought of the notes that Mitch had passed him in geometry class, his irreverent answers to Miss Guest’s inane story problems. Walter figured that beauty and wit, good writing skills, and maybe even great feeling were instruments of power, but he sometimes wondered
if it was the specific construction of Mitch’s spine, if it was that alone that gave the boy the glide and air of a high-ranking church official, a bishop, a cardinal, even. Lucky Mitch! To be Mitch, to have Mitch!

The boys, through their ballet-school life, wore white T-shirts, white socks, black tights and black ballet slippers. The girls changed outfits as they progressed from level to level, wearing different-colored tunics to signify the class and, always, light pink tights and pink ballet shoes. Walter, unable to regally toss his head, rolled up a bandanna into a tube and tied it in a circle to keep the curls out of his eyes.

It had been clear from the start of their careers in dancing school that Susan and Mitch were the two in their age group with natural talent. The older girls kept an eye on Susan, fearful that she would one day overtake them. Ordinarily the misfits of the class formed their own fraternity, but Susan early on claimed Walter as one of the elect. In her childish way she knew only that he was someone to care for. As she grew older she developed a line: He was an unknown quantity. He might not be the most terrific dancer but he was definitely somehow or other going to show his colors.

The three of them had begun dancing in the same year, when they were in fifth grade. Mitch had been tall for his age, and had a robustness that Walter lacked. He had muscle in his rangy legs, but he was also surprisingly light, and could jump. There were several mothers, a club of them, who sat in the front room during the lessons on the sofas with taped-up vinyl cushions, knitting or making tapestries in an effort to soothe their frayed nerves. They did not leave the waiting room while their children executed their demi-pliés behind the closed studio doors. They so hoped their girls were not sticking out their keisters as they bent their knees, that they were sucking in their little tummies! The door was closed expressly to shut out the mothers—The Furies, Walter called them. Although they were not allowed to observe more than twice a year they managed to garner a considerable amount of information. They might be blind to the weaknesses in their own daughters, but they were able to gauge the promise of the other girls. When the class was over and the door opened, they snapped to attention, trying to see on the dancers’ faces who had suffered,
who had been complimented. Mitch, they said, was an adorable boy. He was safe to admire, nothing he could do, really, to outshine their daughters. They had heard Mr. Balanchine’s famous quote, “Ballet is woman,” and taken it to heart.

Mitch would be strong enough to support the girls when it came time for the pas de deux class. In addition to his brawn he already knew how to play the gallant. They could imagine his dancing Prince Siegfried, or Prince Florimund, or the Duke of Silesia. When they spoke about his vigor they meant in part his masculinity, and without passing words they nodded in understanding, in agreement:
he
was not going to grow up to be a homosexual.

On the way home on the train one night Walter wondered out loud if The Furies planned their wardrobes over the telephone. It seemed to him that they all wore the same beige cashmere cardigans with pearl buttons, the same plaid wool skirts, and underneath, no doubt, the constricting panel of the eighteen-hour girdle grimly doing its work. He made the mistake of asking his friends what they thought the mothers said about the three of them. Susan muttered, “I hate them, every single one of those women.” Mitch, sitting next to his girl, blurted, “What they say about
us
, you mean?” Walter realized then that in Mitch’s drama the mothers didn’t even consider Walter. They didn’t see any boy except Mitch. They looked at the place Walter stood at the barre, and saw straight through to the mirror. Susan, in Walter’s defense, shook her head at Mitch and said democratically, “They talk about everyone. They tear all of us to shreds.”