The Short History of a Prince (41 page)

The next day at school after the final bell Walter saw Susan in the hall. She did not dress up anymore, or wear eye makeup or spool her hair around her head. In her loose brown sweatshirt and a pair of faded jeans she looked as if she didn’t care about anything. She was thinner than usual, and pale, and her braid was secured with a thick white band, the sort that holds broccoli in a bunch. When he caught up with her, she began talking as if she’d expected him; she launched in without looking at him, without a greeting, without the usual introductory guideposts for conversation. “My mother told me I shouldn’t go to the hospital anymore, that it isn’t a good idea to see Daniel. She thinks it’s going to hurt me—hurt me—to see him waste away. I said to her, I said, ‘No, Mother. It is not I who is hurting.’ ” She thrust out her dimpled chin and shook her head. “Not I.”

Walter nodded. They walked on down the long hall. After several paces she said, “So why don’t you ever come to the hospital? I know you’re supposed to be sixteen, but I bet they’d let you since you’re close enough. Why don’t you visit?”

He felt as if he hadn’t known anything until the night before, as if the months since the sickness began had been blank, unlived. He
didn’t visit because his parents were too absorbed with Daniel to think about him. He didn’t visit because he hadn’t understood, not really, that his brother was on the verge of death.

“So why don’t you go see him?” she asked again.

He watched the speckled tile pass under his feet. “Because,” he was whispering, “because, ah, they don’t invite me.”

It was clear right off that he’d said the wrong thing. She quit walking. “Because they don’t invite you?” She was speaking out loud, with plenty of volume. There was no corner within range to scuttle around, nothing to hide behind. “Because they don’t invite you.” He winced when she said it a second time, as a statement, and he closed his eyes on the third, when she again made it a question. “Because they don’t invite you?”

He was not going to suffer through her histrionics. There was truth in what he’d said—his parents no longer included him in anything. They were operating under the assumption that he was all right, that he was just fine. He didn’t have to put up with Susan. The scene wasn’t a job interview; he wasn’t going to get graded; there would be no record of the dialogue that would follow him into corporate America. She snatched at his shirt with one hand when he started to walk away. She reeled him in like a practiced hoodlum. “Walter,” she said, holding him tight. “Your brother is dying, do you realize that?”

“Really,” he shouted, jerking his head, slapping at her arm to free himself. “Is that what’s going on? I thought you were all going to the circus night after night. I thought you were having a—an orgy.”

She dropped her three books,
V was for Victory, Sister Carrie
and
Variété du Conte Français
. She was shaking hard enough so that her silver earrings with three little bells tinkled. “Do you—know what, Walter?” She spoke slowly, and as if there were commas she had to observe between every two or three words. “You are—a disgusting—human being. I wouldn’t shed—one lousy—tear—if you were dying. I’d thank—God—that another—evil person—was being wiped off—the face of this earth.”

She gave a final shudder. She didn’t stop to pick up her books. The other students parted down the middle to make way for her as she ran down the hall crying into her hands. Walter went quickly in
the other direction to his locker for his ballet bag. Hysterical, he said to himself. Her sobs were echoing along the corridor. She was over the edge. He had been studying China in his World History class, and he tried to imagine her in the drab pants and tunics the men and women wore, each one indistinguishable from the next. She would never make it in a place like that. They’d capture her and torture her slowly, clanging pots and pans in her ears.

He went to the west door and sat along the brick ledge outside, where he always waited for Mitch. He had been thinking of Daniel, devoting his energy to his brother ten miles away in the hospital, and for the first time since the night before, it dawned on him that Mitch had heard his parents speaking to him. He’d been keenly aware that Mitch was under the bed at first, and then, once his mother began talking, the fact of Mitch’s presence had faded. As Joyce ran her fingers through his hair Walter forgot to be afraid for Mitch. There was nothing fearsome after all about a live boy under a bed in a farce. If there’d been discovery there might have been a few angry questions, a lame excuse or two. No, Walter knew something about fear now, knew what it was meant for, knew that there were varieties of fear, bunny-hill types of fear that in no way prepared you, gave you any sense of the real ride on the big-boy mountain. They, Joyce, Robert and Walter, were about to slide down into a place they couldn’t see, no way to judge the depth, the cold, the darkness.

Walter sat on the ledge for ten minutes while a good portion of the school’s three thousand students poured past him. He wondered how Mitch had gotten out of the house the night before, if he’d gone unseen. Who cared? During third period Walter had been excused from Geometry in order to accompany the Girls’ Choir on the piano for their state-fair audition, and he hadn’t bumped into Mitch during lunch or after gym class. He felt as if he’d gone through the day with his eyes closed, seeing nothing, feeling his way along the corridor. It was their habit to wait for each other, and he supposed he was sitting on the ledge because there wasn’t any reason to think their ritual had changed. They always rode the el to the city together. On Thursday they went downtown right after school even though their class was an hour later than the Monday and Wednesday routine. They liked to have coffee, to lounge in the dressing room and talk shop.

The school had emptied. The minutes ticked by. It was useless, Walter thought, time passing. They would move forward into a terrible end. There was only one possible conclusion, no hope for a last-minute deus ex machina, no hope for a wondrous presto-chango. He stirred a puddle with a stick and he thought he might stay put, stay on and on, sitting on that ledge. When the last loiterers had gone down the street, Walter stood up. He was cold and he had a class and he hated sitting and he hated his feet taking steps along the pavement. Mitch was probably sick again. The chamber of his middle ear, inflamed, bright as a strawberry, might well have filled with fluid. Walter walked slowly toward the el station. A person couldn’t dance with ear troubles, couldn’t keep his balance with a case of otitis media. He’d go to his class, that’s what he’d do, and from there he’d find out how to get to the hospital. He could take a bus or ride a different train, or scratch together all his change from the bottom of his bag and hail a cab. It might be that Daniel wouldn’t know him anymore. He’d go to class and think about what to say, and afterward he’d visit his brother. He’d try to apologize for not knowing what had happened to Daniel over the course of the year. During the barre work he’d dream up a short story, something to make Daniel laugh. Maybe he’d tell him about the Gamble roof and he’d say that he didn’t really know why he’d done it anymore, that everything had become jumbled. He’d learned that you can start out doing something for no reason and then later you invent a slew of explanations, or maybe you discover a true source and motive, maybe you draw out something from a part of yourself you didn’t know existed. He’d hold his brother’s hand. It didn’t matter anymore who was or wasn’t the saint in the family. He’d say he was sorry, and Daniel would understand what was included in the apology.

The studio was often empty on Thursday afternoons. There might be one lone girl who had had a private lesson and was changing her clothes, or someone waiting around from the midday class, reading a book or knitting leg warmers. There was a sixty-year-old woman who rented out the studio on occasion to practice, an untalented woman who couldn’t give up the dance but was too embarrassed to study with the
young
people. There were no Junior classes that day, and the Intermediate class didn’t begin until five-thirty. Walter opened the door
and stood in the waiting room. There was nothing to steal except a battered baby grand and the autographed pictures on the walls. The office, with the cash box, was locked. None of the partitions that made up the changing rooms and the office had their own ceilings, and any movement, a cough, the turning of a page, could be heard over the dividers.

Walter listened. There wasn’t a rustle or the sound of a darning needle pulling through the boxy toe of a pointe shoe. He guessed that Mrs. Manka was out feeding herself, Mr. Kenton having an early one over at the Blackstone Hotel bar, and Mrs. Kenton down on fifth at the beauty salon. He thought himself alone, so that when he walked into the dressing room he had to clap his hand over his mouth to stifle his cry. Mitch was lying on the bench, his eyes closed, his hands folded on his chest with sepulchral neatness and solemnity. For a flash Walter’s lips smarted again from last night’s scene: he could feel Mitch’s long fingers pressing down on his mouth to silence him. He had wanted to say, I love none but you. That was all. A basic declaration. He set his bag on the end of the bench and glanced up into the long tulle skirts that hung from the pole. Because there were so few boys, their changing room was used as a closet for the costumes Mrs. Kenton made for the Advanced classes’ recitals. The skirts and satin bodices had been made for four of the oldest girls who were going to dance a divertissement called
Pas de Quatre
at a Chicago fund-raiser for the arts.

Walter went to the pole that stretched the length of the room and carefully removed one of the costumes from its hanger. He intended just to look at it. Mitch was dead or fast asleep and either way wasn’t going to be good for conversation. Walter felt the creamy white satin and the puff of the short tulle sleeves. He untied the pointe shoes that were fastened to the hanger, shoes that were marked on the bottom, that belonged to Sonja Marendaz. The costume had attracted him, he would later explain to Susan, the way a coin glittering in the light of the alley draws a raccoon. He had read about
Pas de Quatre
and knew its lore, and he relished the idea of four prima ballerinas in 1845 overcoming their rivalries and jealousies to perform on the same stage in London. He thought, I’ll put it on for half a minute, to see what it feels like. It couldn’t do any harm. As he climbed out of his pants he imagined
himself to be Marie Taglioni, the finest dancer in the world in 1845. The costume slid down so easily over his shoulders, and the satin was like cream against his chest. He walked around the room, straining to get the zipper back up, feeling in the costume as if he were swimming at night without wearing a suit. There was both freedom and luxury in the satin and gauze. He flounced down on the bench across from Mitch—he loved how the material of the skirt rose up around him, as if it were displaced water. He leaned over and put on the pointe shoes, tying the pink ribbons around his ankles. Susan had tied her own shoes, crisscrossing the ribbons hundreds of times in front of him, and he followed her motions from memory without much difficulty. The shoes were snug, but he knew they were supposed to be tight. He looped his undershirt around his head in the best approximation he could make of the soft, downy headdresses the girls wore in
Swan Lake
. How fabulous to be a cygnet, he thought. When he stood the skirt fluffed out nicely. There was no mirror and he could only feel, How divine I look! He rose on his pointes and with the tentativeness of a first flight he wobbled and fluttered his arms.

When Walter began singing a fragment of
Swan Lake
and hopping on one foot, the other stretched behind him in an arabesque, Mitch put his hands to his forehead, shielding his eyes, as if from a glare. Walter had seen
Swan Lake
four times at the Auditorium Theater, twice with Sue Rawson, once by himself, and once with Susan. He crossed his arms over his chest, as Odette, the Swan Queen, did at some moment in all of her variations. He bourréed on his tottery pointes to Mitch, humming the strains of Tchaikovsky’s music as he came. It was so sad that the devilish look-alike swan stole the Prince from the beautiful good swan in the bad-magic-versus-true-love contest. It was not as hard to move on pointe as he had anticipated, although his toes were mashed and he couldn’t exactly feel them.

“Help me, would ya?” he said to Mitch. “In the first place, I have no control over my destiny. That’s why the stupid fucking ballet I ended up in is so romantic and miserable. The Prince has jilted me. He’s going off to marry that bitch, my evil twin, Odile. He doesn’t know three crucial facts about her: One, she’s a divorcee; two, she sells Mary Kay products from her basement; and three, she has a drinking problem.”

Mitch stretched and yawned. “You really are an honest-to-God fag, you know that?”

Walter sang in a higher register, exaggerating the pathos of the music. He flapped his fledgling wings and chugged across the room. “In
Swan Lake,”
he moaned, “love and sex can never be consummated, except in death.” He moved in spasms back and forth across the dressing room wailing, “Only in death! Only in death! I think that’s so beeeee—uuuu-tiful.” He sputtered around in a pirouette and came to both feet, to fifth position. “I can do this,” he cried. “Did you see that? I came back to a perfect fifth. I look good, you can’t tell me I don’t!”