The Short History of a Prince (2 page)

Walter had been taken from his Illinois home to Wisconsin, to Lake Margaret, through the summers ever since he was born. His great-grandfather had built the Victorian house, the barn, the pump house, the privy and the summer kitchen. The estate had passed to Joyce’s father and after his death to Joyce and her two sisters and two brothers. Weekend after weekend Joyce’s husband, Robert, stopped at the iron gate and Joyce and her two boys got out and walked up the wooded drive. That was the important part, to walk the last stretch, to see it all come slowly through the trees: first, in the far distance, the glint of the lake, and then the red and blue of the plaid hammock strung between the oaks, and the stone shepherd boy in the middle of the fountain, the grassy opening, the croquet hoops and colored balls, and finally the house itself, the lovely old white clapboard house, with scallops and latticework, the long windows, the lacy curtains, the swing on the front porch moving in the breeze.

Walter loved that walk, the feeling that you couldn’t get to Lake Margaret by car, not really. The place still had the lingering odor of carriage leather, starched sheets and kerosene lamps, and sometimes he imagined that the relatives, all of them who had come before, were still sleeping in their iron beds upstairs under the eaves. They were sleeping, the whiteness of the hot afternoon under their closed lids, the sounds in their ears of the water and the insects, the halyard idly banging against the mast in the soft hot wind. He knew the ancestors because there were photographs on a Peg-Board in the living room, pictures of the jowly great-grandmother and the great-grandfather awkwardly holding a baby. There were pictures of the great-aunts, the solemn young women with their hair piled on top of their heads, and the great-uncles with handlebar mustaches and what looked like
barbershop-quartet clothes. It was so strange, Walter thought, that a house could outlive a person; strange, marvelous even, that he could walk up the drive and out of time.

Walter hated the idea of staying home from the lake, missing the anniversary party, and only because Daniel had a goiter and a sore throat. It was Daniel who, point by point, convinced Joyce that they should go and leave him behind. He would be fine in a day or two, he assured her, and, in case she’d forgotten, he was no longer five but seventeen years old, capable of pouring his own ginger ale and putting himself to bed. Actually, he said, he’d welcome the chance to rest up, to get ready for two important swim team races in the coming week.

The McClouds’ house and the Gambles’ house were the only two homes on Maplewood Avenue that were mirror images of each other, so that kitchen faced kitchen, dining room faced dining room. To set the day to rights Joyce, from the kitchen window, flagged down Mrs. Gamble at her sink. In a matter of seconds both women were out in their yards, standing at the Gambles’ chain-link fence. Daniel’s little dog, Duke, a terrier and beagle mix, did not seem to realize that it was futile to try to mount the Gamble collies through the diamond links, and Joyce absently reached for his choke collar, pulling him to her so that he was standing on his hind legs, his eyes bulging.

“How’s the carport construction coming, Florence?” Joyce asked.

Mrs. Gamble reached over the fence toward Duke. “Give the boy to me.” She hoisted him up, and when she had him, clasped to her bosom, she lifted up the flap of his black ear and whispered down into the inner chamber. He stopped scrabbling and went still.

Joyce remembered then that at breakfast Walter had said something about Mrs. Gamble. What was it? A line about Mrs. Gamble giving an examination, Mrs. Gamble knowing more than they did. She couldn’t get it back exactly. But it was true, she thought, that Florence was like the headmistress of the block, the dread matron patrolling the corridors. She should have had a career, Joyce supposed, a position that made use of her unusual talents. A postal official barking at the next customer to step up to the window, or a meter maid marking time with her long chalk on the stick. When the children pestered the milkman for ice on humid mornings, out Mrs. Gamble
charged from her back door, snapping her bullwhip on the pavement. The urchin pack scattered, gone, not a sound but the burr of the Borden’s motor and the echo of the whip. Why she owned such a thing was a mystery, although some said it had come down to her from her cowhand uncle. Why she felt the need to police the children and the milkman was another puzzle. Joyce had found Walter trembling in the bushes once, the ice melting in his clenched fist, water running down his arm. There was probably not enough in Florence’s three-story house, Joyce thought, and the quarter-acre lot, to keep a woman with her intellect occupied, and so she had moved beyond her property line, out into the alley, to keep watch and edify. There was no doubt that she was the pioneer with improvements on Maplewood Avenue: there had been the state-of-the-art chain-link fence, and then the rubber straps with hooks that went over the top of the trash cans to prevent retarded Billy Wexler from swiping the lids. Most recently, there was to be the addition of the carport.

Each house had its own matching garage facing the alley, but the Gambles were soon also going to have a driveway up their front lawn, ending in a carport. No one had driveways in Oak Ridge, Illinois, much less a carport. No one had ever dreamed of a carport. “How’s the construction coming?” Joyce asked again.

After the update on the project, the slackers who passed for workmen, the crack in the concrete, the broken spotlight, Joyce asked Mrs. Gamble if she could keep an eye on Daniel while the family went off to Wisconsin to celebrate Jeannie and Ted’s wedding anniversary.

Mrs. Gamble raised her blond eyebrow. “How long?”

“It will take most of the day, but we’ll try to be home before dark,” Joyce said. “Daniel knows to call you if he feels—”

“No. How many years? How long has it been for Ted?”

“Twenty-five, Florence. They, Ted
and
Jeannie, have been married for twenty-five years.” Before Mrs. Gamble could make a remark about her relations, Joyce reached for Duke, prattling in a motherly way—“Here you come, upsa-daisy.”

Mrs. Gamble grinned into the glare of the sun and murmured, “I hope the Jell-Os don’t melt on the way.”

She always watched over the McClouds’ house when they were gone. It was not a hardship for her, no more devotion required to
watch an empty house than a full one. Walter imagined her taking the key from her apron pocket, opening the back door, and roaming through their house when they were away, during a thunderstorm, under the pretext of checking the windows. He pictured her moving silently through all of their rooms, transfixed, so that her personal habits fell away and she didn’t need to pluck at her shirt or clear her throat. She would not open the drawers or rummage around the attic. Through the simple darkness of the house she’d see into Robert and Joyce and Daniel and himself; she’d see their dreams laid out before her, see their unrealistic aspirations, their daffy ideals and the thin weave of their allegiances.

In adulthood Walter made an effort to refrain from thinking of the scenes of his boyhood as Greek theater, and yet, in spite of his resolve, he could not keep from associating Mrs. Gamble with Daniel’s sickness. She was the old lady seer, the one with the pin curls, the X’s of the bobby pins spelling out an oracle. It was Mrs. Gamble, after all, who watched over Daniel on Aunt Jeannie’s anniversary. In their absence she may have walked through the McClouds’ house whispering,
I hope the lawn chemicals haven’t leached into the water, I hope the lead pipes haven’t poisoned
.… I
hope the pollution from Gary.… I hope it isn’t, I hope it hasn’t
. She might have left in her wake something as insubstantial, as potent, as a dark hope.

As it turned out there was so much baggage on the trip to Lake Margaret that Walter’s friends, Susan and Mitch, sat crushed in one fold-out seat in the back of the car, and Walter was left with the middle bench seat. Robert McCloud had arranged the two aquamarine coolers, the suitcases and the grocery bags. It wasn’t for nothing, he said, that Joyce had been a Girl Scout: she was fully prepared for an ice age, a drought, a monsoon and the invasion of the termites. Walter was pinned against the door by the coolers, it was awkward to turn around, and he had to shout to be heard. The teenagers gave up talking after a few minutes on the expressway. Susan and Mitch fell asleep against each other. Nothing had gone according to plan, and Walter
stared gloomily out the window. Just as well that Daniel was sick, he thought. If he’d come they’d have had to tie him to the roof rack.

Joyce glanced back now and then to make sure there was nothing unseemly going on between the two lovebirds in the kiddie seat. She gave her husband a preview of the day to come, quietly, and with restraint, evoking her hysterical sister. Even marking the gestures, not imitating them full out, was funny, and Robert snorted into his shirt and twice said, “Oh, Joycie.”

She had enough sense not to ask Walter if he was all right. She could see that he was troubled about something, and he in his turn knew that she had taken note of his unhappiness. Her general sympathy brought him a guilty little pleasure. His thin skin and tender heart were at once a source of pride and anxiety to her. He had asked to study ballet, she had known better than to try to talk him out of it, and she had clung to the belief that his enthusiasm for the dance would shield him from the predictable taunts. It had been such a stroke of luck that his two dancing-school friends happened to live in Oak Ridge. They had been put together in the First Junior Class at the Kenton School of Ballet in Chicago when they were ten years old and together they’d advanced all the way up to the Second Intermediate Class. But through good and bad fortune Walter would always have his own temperament, and Joyce feared that he would feel the injuries of adolescence more keenly than his peers. Still, she hadn’t given up on a straightforward future for him, and she wondered if it was Susan, if the leggy girl squeezing against Mitch, was the source of his present misery.

Her conclusion was not exactly off the mark. Walter was thinking about the night the week before, when he and Susan and Mitch had been in the McClouds’ living room, dancing and listening to records. Walter had picked out Tchaikovsky’s
Serenade
, a piece that had been their favorite since the previous summer. George Balanchine, the greatest choreographer in the history of the dance, according to Walter, had made a plotless ballet to the music, and Walter, in a tribute to both virtuosos, had the volume up so high that the Gamble dogs, in their yard, cocked their heads this way and that, hearing noises in a frequency Tchaikovsky never intended. The dancers rushed headlong
in and out of the doors, running the length of the room with their arms outstretched, doing the bits of the Balanchine choreography they had absorbed over the years. Between the three of them they had seen eight performances of
Serenade
. Walter and his aunt Sue Rawson had seen it four times the month before, night after night at Ravinia Park.

Mitch was always the man, intermittently lifting Susan over his head and carrying her around like a barbell. It seemed to Walter that Mitch’s strength was inherent, that it was a quality he had not had to work for, no need to lift weights or wrestle or play a lot of catch. It was just there, that strength, a part of him. There were a few hard, fast, unstated rules to their dancing game, principles not to be broken or bent. They were meant for Walter. It was curious, he thought, that he understood the protocol instinctively, that no one had ever had to slap his wrist or say, Repeat after me. Funny, that it was the kind of thing he knew with animal sense. He was not allowed to lift Susan, but he could offer his arm if she wanted support for an arabesque. He was not to turn her; the pirouette business was also Mitch’s privilege. Susan, however, could turn Walter, with good humor on both sides. He most certainly was not to attempt, even as a joke, to lift Mitch. But he could touch Mitch if, say, they were dancing in a circle, holding hands. Then they were comrades, the three of them. When they spun there was nearly an absence of possession.

Walter, in the first movement of
Serenade
, threw himself into the wind of the large fan on the dining-room table and struck a pose. He buffeted back and forth, in and out of the steady push of air. If only he had on one of the blue chiffon costumes that Balanchine’s dancers wore, a gown that would flutter and billow after him. He was going full tilt—no one could say that he did not have enough feeling for the entire ensemble of twenty-eight girls. “Not having the blue dresses,” he panted as he jetéed past Susan, “for this ballet, is probably on a par with riding a motorcycle and”—he called over his shoulder—“finding that it doesn’t rev.”

“You’re right,” she said, flying at him, taking his waist in both her hands and spinning him. “Something’s missing. Your shorts don’t really cut it.”

Walter promptly ran upstairs and put on his heavily brocaded velvet suit coat, a genuine piece from Liberace’s Mr. Showmanship Collection, an item he had found on a day God blessed him for fifteen dollars at a yard sale. It was his next best thing, in lieu of a layered blue chiffon gown with spaghetti straps. He couldn’t help smiling Liberace’s stiff jewely grin when he wore the suit coat. As he came back into the room it dawned on him that Liberace, Tchaikovsky and Balanchine were really after the same aesthetic. He threw his head back trying to dance as if Balanchine had first choreographed the ballet expressly for Liberace, and as if Tchaikovsky had written the music only with the Mr. Showmanship suit coat in mind. He was thinking, as he moved, that there was surely a place between the hootchy-kootchy, the watusi, well beyond the hokey pokey, but running neck and neck with the gavotte, the galliard, the courante, and with all due respect to the cha-cha, the fandango, the monkey and the mambo—a place where those forms would meld into something very like what he thought he was doing with his hips at that moment.