The Short History of a Prince (12 page)

It was a gamble for any mother pushing her child to the dance. There was no telling who was going to come through adolescence. The girls, especially, might have potential, and at thirteen stop growing, or start growing, develop large breasts, become wide in the hips. It was unfortunate, and sometimes a travesty, what puberty did to the girls. There was the added danger of rebellion: even the delicately built dancers got tired of the discipline, ate whatever they pleased or went astray with boyfriends, alcohol, parties. A boy with a solid foundation, with the goods in place at the start, was not as susceptible to physical ruin. By the teen years, if he’d held on that long, he might well have become accustomed to being called queer and built his defenses.
Mitch’s teachers had high hopes that his last growth spurt and the thickening of his chest would not spoil his nearly flawless form.

To have a boy, a serious boy, was unusual in any regional ballet school, and both Mr. and Mrs. Kenton believed that Mitch had the talent for a top-flight company. Not only did he have the right build but he had innate musical sense. They were ecstatic to have such a student, and the mother as well, a woman who had wanted to dance, who had ambition for her son. She did not often sit in the waiting room, but every quarter she paid an extra sum for a private lesson, and she phoned periodically for a progress report. Mrs. Anderson had been Maureen O’Kelly before her marriage, an Oak Ridge girl who had almost made it to the Covent Garden stage, when she broke her foot in several places. Mr. Anderson, the Swede, had died suddenly in Terre Haute, Indiana, when Mitch was two, and his widow had come home to live with her mother and her older sister, both of whom had had a hand in raising Mitch. Because he was the object of so much attention and hope, and because his body adapted without difficulty to the classical ballet technique, he could afford to be lazy and good-natured. Walter wondered if Mitch believed that everyone else’s wishes would carry him to stardom. Mrs. Kenton had the habit of shaking her head, dismissing his sloppy steps, pardoning his forgetfulness. She snorted daintily, and murmured,
“That
Mitch.” It was clear to Walter that Mrs. Kenton would never say dreamily or otherwise,
That
Walter. He knew that neither his character nor a few choice expressions had currency, that a crooked smile, a sweet hangdog look, would not excuse a defect or a lapse.

Susan Claridge was small for her age at ten, but she had legs that every mother at the studio wished for in a daughter. It was inevitable that the women invoke the horse when they had the chance to watch her chassé across the studio floor. They dubbed her Suzie; they were intimate enough with her, they thought, to use a diminutive. Suzie, they sighed, had limbs like a filly. Suzie, they regretfully acknowledged, had no trace of little-girl flab. The prosaic name, Susan Claridge, could be changed. Look at the New York City Ballet, at Roberta Sue Ficker, who had become Suzanne Farrell, or Nelly Guillerm, rechristened Violette Verdy. A name was disposable. Suzie was lean
and muscular and lithe. She had proportion, from head to toe, nothing oversized, and she was undersized in all the right departments. She had shiny blond hair, which she did up in two braids right before class, standing in the middle of the waiting room, in front of a rapt audience. With the pins in her mouth she stared at the wall, at the autographed pictures of Margot Fonteyn. She carefully coiled the braids on each side of her head, and one by one she removed the pins from between her teeth, securing the buns. She wouldn’t let her own mother touch her head, much less any of the ladies who would have so loved to give her a pat.

Walter had always squatted on the floor watching that ritual without trying to conceal his fascination. She did not seem to notice any of her devotees, women or children. At ten she inspired awe when she did something as simple as braid her hair, or stretch, her head to her knees. She had presence, something the mothers feared their girls would never be able to acquire or imitate. Like Mitch, Susan also had a body that tended naturally toward the lines of the classical ideal. Her knees were hyperextended, her long arms were lyrical in any position, and when she was older her feet, disfigured by corns and bunions, were pliant and smooth in her pink-satin pointe shoes. She seemed, furthermore, to be innocent, kind and not at all snooty or temperamental. Many of the mothers were grateful to her for her goodness, and it was difficult for the more imperious and resentful women to bad-mouth her. They knew it was not dignified or appropriate for grown women to pay homage to a child, and yet they couldn’t help themselves. For three years in a row, when she was eleven, twelve and thirteen, Susan played Clara in Chicago’s production of
The Nutcracker
. She was so unmistakably on her way. For two of those years Mitch was her prince, her consort. The four times that Walter auditioned he made it past the first cut, but he only once progressed to the third round, in spite of the word that there was a shortage of boys.

In his late teenage years Walter realized that had he been a Russian or a New Yorker, had he applied to the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow or to the School of American Ballet, he would not have passed the preliminary interview. At both of those schools a prospective must have a physical and an audition. Each dancer is evaluated for strength, for aptitude and for inherent structural weaknesses. Walter
had feet that were not technically flat, but they had very little shape, and his thin legs brought to mind a horse with spavin. At a school dedicated to producing professionals of the highest caliber, Walter would not have gone on past the doctor’s examination. Mr. and Mrs. Kenton, former soloists of the Ballet Russe, had high standards, certainly. They demanded effort at all times, and excellence if possible—but they did not turn away pupils at the door. All were welcome to try their luck.

When Walter first took lessons, he was convinced that Margery and Franklin Kenton, natives of Edinburgh, Scotland, were related, both of them, by blood, via the Romanovs, to the House of Windsor. They had impeccable BBC accents, they’d been to Russia, Franklin wore an ascot, and Margery had perfect posture, which she tried to duplicate in her students by holding a cane to their backs when they did their demi and grand plies. She wore her dark hair in a bun like Walter’s favorite near-royal figure Mrs. Simpson, and she wore a black silk skirt that came to her knees. When she demonstrated an exercise she demurely raised her skirt an inch or two, to show more of her leg, to show the line. It was vaguely mysterious that she had no babies, and yet she seemed not to have missed loving a child of her own. None of the pupils could imagine love from someone so remote and exacting. It was her praise, the smallest word, that would mean more than a kiss or an embrace. She kept the beat crisp, clean, snapping her fingers severely and counting sternly out loud. There was never any doubt where the beat began and where it ended. Walter couldn’t imagine her lingering over anything, savoring a peppermint stick or reading a sentence more than once. Perish the thought of her bathing. He was certain that she never shed her black leotard down to her skin, that lying rigid in her single bed, next to Franklin’s single bed, she still wore her dancing skirt.

Walter dreamed about breakthroughs, in his own technique and in the appetite of the ballet world. What he would have given to be the dancer, the understudy, who happens to be in the audience when the Prince fractures his kneecap!
Walter McCloud
, the paper would report,
was overlooked at his ballet school but he studied the part on his own and after a slight delay for warm-ups and stage directions made his stunning debut
. He lived in that fantasy for hours at a time, making adjustments
to his costume, his curtain call, the flowers given, the accolades in his dressing room following the performance. In fact, Walter knew he was better off than many of the girls at the Kentons’. He was fortunate to be a boy, to have the status of a rare one. Both of his teachers encouraged him and he was usually called to the front row during the center work, a sign of favor.

Mr. Kenton was less remote than his wife, but when he engaged with the students he was often harsh and sarcastic. He persecuted the girls who were clumsy, who had large rear ends, who made mistakes, who seemed to be dim-witted. The class seized up when he yelled at a stupid clod.
Thank God, thank God it is not me
, each one thought. Ballet school was a brutal society, no doubt about it, but Walter believed that the cruelty was necessary. It took a caste system based on body type, and a dictator, to make artists out of a few talented long-legged suburban girls. Although the Kentons disliked different people, multiplying then, those who were shut out, they were united in the dancers they chose to love. If you were favored, how the sun shone down upon you!

Before class the fat and the short and the ungainly gathered around the baby grand in the corner to listen to the piano player make disparaging remarks about famous ballerinas and about her employers. It was terrifying too, when the Kentons shouted at Mrs. Manka. Sometimes her tempo was sluggish or she played a mazurka when a waltz would have been more fitting. The Kentons’ tone was like a good whipping. When they shamed her she turned red all down her neck and her arms, and she sputtered apologies, frantically leafing through her binders to find an alternate selection.

It was Mrs. Manka who took in the branded girls, who comforted them and gave them fresh hairnets for their slapdash buns. The haughty girls, those with promise, didn’t speak to her, didn’t need her ministrations. By Walter’s rough calculations Mrs. Manka was no more than two hundred pounds overweight. What torture it must have been for her, to be the pig in an order of plucked chickens. He loved watching her little head bob and sway as she played her schmaltzy melodies, she, who could make Bach sound like lounge music. It was her beloved Chopin, he guessed, who carried her along through the tedious hours of class, Chopin who made the misery
worthwhile. She had mastered the art of smoking with no hands, and she puffed away at her cigarette as she played, the black holder sticking straight out of her mouth. She leaned back, always in the nick of time, so that the ashes fell into the dish on the nearby table.

Walter wasn’t scorned by Mr. Kenton; he told all the gossip he could think of to Mrs. Manka before class and he was not stigmatized for the association; and to top it off he was friends with Susan and Mitch, even when he did not get a part in
The Nutcracker
year after year. He was in every one of the camps at the Kenton School of Ballet, an accomplishment, a feat, to be able to move like a journalist across the borders. In his sanguine moments he told himself that if he’d been in a primitive society, more primitive, that is, than the Kentons’—if he’d lived in a tribe, in the jungle—he would have been a magic man, someone who was worshipped.

As they grew older his two friends recognized that Walter had, not talent exactly, but certainly something, a flair, you could call it. First of all, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of ballet and music history. He had such strong opinions about productions that had taken place in the thirties and forties that they half believed he’d seen them with his own eyes. It was Sue Rawson who had witnessed early Balanchine and passed on the lore to Walter. She also lent him books—with grave admonitions to return them with no stains or dog-ears or smudges. She had books about Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Fokine, Petipa, about the male in ballet, the female in ballet, about Lincoln Kirstein, Pavlova, Markova, Fonteyn and Tallchief. By the time Walter was thirteen he had read all the ballet books in Sue Rawson’s library, and he had an enviable collection of LP’s, many of which his aunt had given him. He carried the music of the great ballets around in his head by day, and at night he fell asleep to the strains of
Swan Lake
coming from his cheap portable stereo. When he woke to Sunshine Gamble’s barking in the early morning, he felt as if his heart had been beating in waltz time through his dreams. He could sing on command all the variations of
Sleeping Beauty, Raymonda, Les Sylphides, Giselle
and
Coppélia
.

When he went to Susan’s or Mitch’s house they often played the music game. One of the friends put on a record and Walter was to guess the composer, the title and the soloist, and if he knew the soloist
he could often say the record label, because prima donnas had their contracts with specific companies. At the height of his powers and if he was on a streak, he could name the orchestra and the conductor. Sometimes they played the game as a contest, Mitch as the MC, Susan versus Walter. None of them paid much attention to the Vietnam War or to President Nixon’s reelection campaign. They didn’t know anyone who had been touched by the war and the boys assumed that it would be over by the time they reached draft age. Walter sometimes poked his head into Daniel’s room to look at the poster on the wall of Mark Spitz in his skimpy little suit, all seven medals hanging around his wet neck. And he had read at the dentist’s office that J. Edgar Hoover might have been a homosexual. If he had been questioned about major figures in current events he would have been hard pressed to think of anyone besides Nixon, Kissinger, Hoover, Mark Spitz, and a senatorial candidate Sue Rawson said was dangerous, a man named Helms from North Carolina.

In addition to his wealth of ballet and music lore, Walter could imitate, down to the smallest gesture, any of The Furies, Mr. and Mrs. Kenton and Mrs. Manka. He was the jester, he knew, responsible for delivering the truth and maintaining good humor. He took the job seriously. Into Susan’s living room he walked, snapping his fingers as Mrs. Kenton did, counting punctiliously and viciously correcting the posture of Mrs. Claridge’s highboy. The next minute he was Mrs. Manka, sitting at the piano, one of Mr. Claridge’s cigarettes hanging from his lip, banging out Rachmaninoff with exaggerated tempestuousness. Enter Mr. Kenton, ripping off his ascot, screaming at the pianist, “Slut! You gelatinous slut! You, you stout-bodied killifish! You slab of cold flummery!” Mrs. Manka again: cowering, mashing the cigarette into her mouth, trying to flip through
Teaching Little Fingers to Play
to find another piece. Susan stood at the bookcase laughing, but Mitch—Mitch rolled on the floor and wept until he’d exhausted himself. Walter never broke character, never cracked a smile. How he loved Mitch’s laughter! Susan thought Walter brilliant, and she also believed that he was free of vanity and pride, free of ego. Such a thing, in and of itself, she said solemnly to Mitch, was unique, something that should be treasured.