The Short History of a Prince (13 page)

That fall Daniel was sick Walter got in the habit of walking the couple to Susan’s house after ballet class, after the trip to Oak Ridge on the el. He left them nuzzling at her door and slowly he made his way south to Maplewood Avenue. He couldn’t get in the door at home, couldn’t reach the top step of the front porch without Joyce appearing, pushing Daniel’s dog across the floor, telling Walter to take him for a walk. The animal’s legs were locked, its claws scratching across the gray paint as Joyce nudged him from behind. Walter had hit Duke a few times in his puppyhood, when he deserved it, and the dog still had the nerve to cower. If communication had been possible, Walter would have asked the mutt to be reasonable, to consider that he and it saw eye to eye. He, on the whole, didn’t like the idea of the leash any more than the dog did. The leather strap offended Walter’s sense of trust, and furthermore he was not interested in playing the role of the master. It was the arrangement, was it not, he said to Duke, that man and dog were companions, and therefore the beast had no business acting like a tyrant? If Walter put the mongrel on the leash the runt strained at it, making ghastly noises, so that Walter wanted to gag in commiseration.

Long before it was the law or the badge of refinement Mrs. Gamble, always tidy, walked up and down the alley and with her silver trowel she prodded the dogs’ stools onto the scoop and deposited them into a sandwich bag. Walter didn’t want to have to do that; he wasn’t equipped to do such a thing. Night after night Duke at first trotted beside him, free, as if they were on good terms. When the animal, the mutt, got to the hydrant at the end of the block, he lifted his leg, watching Walter out of the corner of his nearly lidless left brown eye. Walter had no interest in looking on as the dog pissed, and he’d glance at the sky and back to the dog, a shrub and back to the dog. For just a minute he’d spy on a dinner scene, or a family around the television, and in that time Duke would streak off into the night. Walter would turn back to check him and find nothing but the dying grass on the parkway, the drip down the hydrant, the empty street. Duke,
vaporized in the space of a heartbeat. It wasn’t the vanishing act itself that irritated Walter but the fact that the dog understood him and could anticipate his movements. It was unnerving the way the animal knew exactly when it was safe to bolt. Although it was not difficult to track him, the task set Walter cursing, pulling leaves from the neighbors’ shrubs as he ran. It was predictable that the dog would try to hump the Gamble collies through the fence, or try to mount poor old Billy Wexler’s leg out in the alley, his clutching paws crossed in the back of Billy’s knee. The dog had supposedly been neutered and he was still a sex fiend.

“I hate you, I hate you,” Walter chanted as he roamed the block, alert to the smell in the wind, trying to find the dog. If Duke hadn’t been Daniel’s, he thought he might have tried to kill him, might have picked him up and slammed him against a cement wall. “I hate you, you shitstorm. You goddamn shitstorm. What I would give for Mrs. Gamble’s bullwhip so I could reduce you to a bloody smear.”

Walter did not usually swear and he had never before threatened to beat any living thing to death. Duke, he guessed, appealed to the deeply buried brute in him, the Harley-driving, tattoo-armed, leather-jacketed real man, someone who would take great satisfaction in beating the tar out of the demonic little dick-bastard of a dog. Once he got started talking hatefully to his brother’s pet he couldn’t stop. It was amazing, he knew, that the eight-inch-tall dog with a white-tipped tail, the animal the Kloper girls called Poochie, could make Walter feel so extravagantly foul.

Some nights he used the leash and ignored the pitiful and repulsive slathering. He walked to the center of town, to the whole-food store, Nature’s Health. He would not yet have had his supper, and in all the world what he wanted was to sit at the snack bar and order a tiger milk shake, a drink that had a lot of coconut in it and a secret ingredient that would absolutely give him physical strength and mental vigor. Walter felt guilty going over to Nature’s Health when Uncle Ted’s Jewel Food Store was two blocks away. There was an intimacy at Nature’s Health, not only because of the size of the place but also because of the curious, nearly unpleasant odor. He felt as if he were in someone’s poorly ventilated house, that he was smelling a stuffy bedroom. The stink Walter both didn’t quite like and wanted more of
came from the muddy beans in the cedar bins, the herbs and roots in paper bags, and the dusty whole grains, the noodles, the nutritional yeast, the granolas and the exotic nuts in the white buckets on the floor. Back at the deli there was always the woody sweetness of fresh carrot juice. The smell of the place was mysterious and close, and it drew Walter in, to the counter where he ordered a tiger milk shake for clarity and vim.

Mrs. Gamble shopped at Nature’s Health for all her groceries, except cigarettes, and in the evenings she was often making her way down the narrow aisles stocking her cart with vanilla-bean ice cream, acidophilus milk, potato-flour bread, and peach kefir in swollen cardboard containers. She always wore her apron, the strip of heavy fabric around her waist that had pockets for her tools, her wallet, the trowel and the Baggies. She bought organic beef for the dogs, an Adele Davis brew for extended life, as well as everyday nutritional supplements: wheat germ, niacin and folic acid, the Vitamin B complex, Vitamin E capsules and time-release C in 1000 milligrams. She’d come to Walter, lean against the counter and look over her glasses into his face. He had always felt as if he was supposed to hold still, as if her scrutiny was a privilege.

One night that October she approached the snack bar, and instead of chastising Walter as she usually did for tying Duke to the meter, she narrowed her eyes and said, “I think Daniel has pellagra.” She cleared her throat, plucking at her shirt between her breasts and waited, this time for him to question her. He knew he should inquire about the specifics of the disease, about which she naturally had superior knowledge. When he didn’t speak she continued to squint at him over her bifocals. He was determined not to say a word, to stare her down, to make her feel that he could see clear past her eyeballs, down her throat, into her own black heart. He hated her, too. “As—I’m—sure—you—know,” she said, slowly and contemptuously, “pellagra is a disease caused by the deficiency of niacin and protein in the diet, and characterized by skin eruptions, digestive and nervous system disturbances, and even”—she leisurely hacked twice—“eventual mental deterioration.”

“Gosh,” Walter said, “you mean the shortage of one little vitamin and Daniel might lose his marbles?”

She was going to come very near him, call him “young man” in the menacing way she reserved for boys who spit in the alley, who teased the dogs. Her movements were like smoke, the waft of her right in his face. “You,” she purled, “none of you, are looking for the right signs.”

She didn’t mean astrology, he knew that. When she read her book and made her pronouncements she was straightforward about the business. Walter supposed she was trying to tell him that there was no reason for Joyce to spend her time and money consulting doctors when she lived next door to Mrs. Gamble, a person who could over her own counter dispense niacin and organic lamb-burger patties.

“It’s essential,” she spit. “Niacin is an essential vitamin.”

“Essential,” Walter repeated. “I see.”

She began twisting the cap off a small dark brown bottle. She removed the wad of cotton from the top and shook out half of the contents, about twenty white pills. “Take them,” she ordered. Before she could explain the regimen, how many a day, with or without food, he obediently stuffed all of the tablets into his mouth, chewed, chewed, and washed them down with his tiger milk shake. Well fortified, he swirled off the stool and skimmed out the door. He did not glance back to see Mrs. Gamble stricken, her little eyes bulging, her hand at her throat. He unwound Duke from the meter and dragged him wheezing and gagging all the way home.

Walter did not bother trying out again for
The Nutcracker
that season. He had been to the auditions at the Arie Crown Theater the previous four years, dancing the combination the ballet master demonstrated without making any errors. He was good at picking up combinations, and he could reverse complex steps without having to think them out first, the way his friends did, without using his hands to mark the movements. Susan and Mitch went off to the theater after class one Saturday to see if they could again land a part in the annual Christmas extravaganza. By three o’clock in the afternoon Susan was both a snowflake and a waltzing flower. Mitch, much too tall for the prince and too young for the character roles in the second act, graduated to
the part of the Mouse King. After the call from Mitch, Walter shut himself in his room and listened to Montserrat Caballé sing Elisabetta in
Don Carlo
. He sang the Italian and at the same time read the English from the libretto that came in the boxed set.

You who knew the vanities of the world and enjoy in the tomb profound repose, if they still weep in heaven, weep over my sorrow and carry my tears to the throne of the lord
.

But it wasn’t enough to suffer the simple humiliation that came with being the worst on the team, so bad there wasn’t any reason to try to hit the ball. No, not enough to be flat out rejected, repeatedly, without so much as a thank you, try us again. The last week in October, Walter suffered a deeper humiliation. Just as class was ending, as they were taking their final bows, Mr. Kenton announced that he’d like to see Walter in his office. Walter, bending to the floor in the révérence, said to his shoes, “Me?” A summons was usually a portent of good fortune. It meant a promotion to the next class level. He stood up, his heart banging in his chest. It was suddenly not beyond Walter’s wildest dream that he should be moved to the Advanced Class, without Susan or Mitch, leaving them in the Second Intermediate Class, to work up to his level. He’d been too close to his talent after so many years to be a real judge. Mr. Kenton was going to tell him that only now had they, he and Mrs. Kenton, realized that Walter had a special ability, so rarefied they had heretofore been unable to detect it. But they had seen! They saw! They had been initiated!

“You’d like me—?” he said, his fingers like prongs poking into his chest.

Mr. Kenton’s cigarette was hanging out of his mouth, his arm extended to usher Walter through the door of the studio and into the musty inner sanctum, the place where Mr. Kenton smoked and talked on the phone and Mrs. Kenton worked at the books and sewed the Advanced girls’ recital costumes.

Something fantastic is about to happen, Walter thought, stepping into the office. His teachers had finally felt his passion. Never mind that he had no technique, that he hadn’t the basic tools most dancers
need to convey in the classical mode the complexity of human feeling—that was of no consequence and was actually limiting to Walter’s type of artistry.

“Have a seat,” Mr. Kenton said. The pate that he was going to wear for Herr Drosselmeyer in the Arie Crown Production of
The Nutcracker
was for some reason on a wig stand on his desk. It was as if there were two people present, a baldy and a slick-haired Mr. K., to tell him the good news. Walter sat on the edge of the chair and folded his hands. When he realized it was his own shuddering legs that were making the chair wobble he clutched his knees. The chair continued to clatter, so he put both hands on either side of him, bracing the seat, holding it firmly in place.

“I got a call from the Rockford Ballet this morning,” Mr. Kenton said. “From a Miss Amy. She’s looking to put together a cast for her
Nutcracker
. She needs a teenage Prince and she’s not having any luck. You came to mind right off.”

“The Rockford Ballet,” Walter echoed. He shut his eyes, squeezed them tight. “The Rockford Ballet.” Perhaps he was snug and warm in his bed, fast asleep. It was a joke, a funny, funny prank—the whole class was going to jump up from behind the desk and yell SURPRISE! Wasn’t that hilarious, Wally? Wasn’t that the most reckless joke—THE ROCKFORD BALLET! Bet you didn’t even know there was a town in northern Illinois called Rockford. Here is the church, here is the steeple, here is the studio called Miss Amy’s Dance Emporium, up above the Main Street Bar and Grill. Here is Miss Amy in her red-and-white polka-dot bandanna, Miss Amy who has dedicated her life to teaching jazz, tap, gymnastics, ballet, modern and the fine art of the hula hoop. She’s got every mother within the city limits sewing satinet costumes for the production that’s going to be in the Rehabilitation Center’s Gymnasium. They’ll just push the bars aside, the contraptions they use to teach the paraplegics to walk.