The Short History of a Prince (20 page)

Walter doubted that he would ever fondly remember the scenes of that December, the season of the Rockford Ballet. As he grew older and he came to love his awkward and earnest young self he still could not laugh over the Christmas party, the time he fell down the backstairs, his head banging on every step. Mitch had bent over him on the kitchen floor, Mitch, as concerned and loving as Florence Nightingale, holding an ice pack to his wounded forehead.

Daniel, in fact, was better in December, as well as he would ever be again. Walter was given selective information about the treatments, but he also overheard enough telephone conversations to piece together some parts that had been omitted. At the time he did not realize that his parents were trying to keep some of the details from him. They had never been garrulous, that was all. He assumed that the therapies were going to make Daniel well, and in the meantime there was nothing much to say. Daniel had had radiation in November to take care of a mass of some sort in his chest, and there had been a complication with the second surgery. At the urging of the family lawyer, Joyce and Robert were thinking about taking legal action against an incompetent doctor. This bit Walter found out because Aunt Jeannie asked him about it. The surgeon had stitched up Daniel in a way that was troublesome but apparently not life-threatening. So, Good, Walter thought. A lawyer and a team of doctors working for Daniel. Everything would eventually turn out just fine with the professional people on his brother’s side.

He might have asked Joyce about the sickness in the hours they spent driving to Rockford for the
Nutcracker
rehearsals. But she did not seem to want to talk, and anyway Walter had homework to do by flashlight in the winter darkness. Joyce was living her life in the car, he knew, driving Daniel to the hospital in downtown Chicago several
times a week, and then many afternoons she turned around and shuttled Walter the other direction, an hour and a half to Rockford for his rehearsals and an hour and a half back home.

The Rockford Ballet wasn’t entirely a nice opportunity, as Mr. Kenton had promised, but well before the run was over Walter admitted that it was probably worth doing. He told himself that it was good training for some future career, exploring third-world countries or rocketing to airless, cratered planets. Miss Amy, the director, producer and choreographer, had put out a talent search for a teenage boy, for the leading role of the Prince. She had choreographed her own version of the ballet, and while she meant to use many of her own dancers, she had no intention of depending on little children to enthrall the audience. She had zero tolerance, she said, for cuteness. Hers was a serious, full-length ballet featuring emerging and mature talent. The Prince and Clara were demanding roles for advanced students. Clara had several variations on pointe, and it was imperative that the Prince have partnering skills. There were no older boys in Miss Amy’s school, and it turned out to be more arduous than she’d anticipated to find a boy who was both suitable and willing to travel to Rockford.

At the audition, it did not take long for Miss Amy to see that Walter would suffice. She had grandiose ideas but flexible standards. Dancing alone on the parquet floor in the studio above Debbie’s Beauty Shop on Kishwaukee Street, he had no sense that he, Walter McCloud, really did have physical appeal. His dark curly hair, his dignified, slightly aquiline nose, the red lipstick he’d found in the car and applied to his mouth as an act of defiance—against whom, for what, he wasn’t sure—all gave him a theatrical look, somewhere between grieving Edith Piaf and loopy Carol Burnett. He extended his leg à la seconde, tragically, and spun around and around with his head thrown back, like a skater.

Miss Amy was the first person to see possibility in Walter’s dancing. It wasn’t exactly potential that he had, she said, trying to explain to the stage manager after the audition. “I can’t describe it exactly, except to say that I think he’s got this raw kind of possibility.”

It seemed to her that he might be an actor. He was her last candidate, and she considered that it might not matter much if he couldn’t
point his foot. The boy from Peoria who’d tried out could jump, but he’d had no expression, no vitality. What counted, in the end, she said, was that Walter had moved his arms and legs as if he believed he was a prince. She’d asked him to walk across the floor in character, and although he’d overdone it slightly, so upright he was in danger of falling backward, she felt she could rein him in, subdue him.

Walter would never go so far as to say that Mr. Kenton had done him a favor by showing him the way to Miss Amy. But two weeks into the rehearsals he began to nurse along a hope. There was a chance—remote, to be sure—but a chance nonetheless, that what happened at Lincoln Center, or at the Arie Crown Theater, could also take place in Rockford. It was not out of the question. The lights might go down on opening night, in the theater, the little box of a room black for an instant just as the canned music came through the speakers, and the world, all of life beyond the stage, might dissolve. There could conceivably be enchantment right there in Rockford. It was Miss Amy with her frizzy blond hair tucked into a lavender silk scarf, walking across the floor with him, correcting his posture and praising his princeliness, who gave Walter the idea that Magic, after all, did not have to be expensive.

He did not speak about his “nice opportunity” with his friends. They were absorbed with their own performances. He certainly did not tell them that he was one of two leading males. The other, the Sugar Plum Fairy’s cavalier, a stuck-up thirty-eight-year-old named Philip, from Milwaukee, didn’t talk to anyone except Miss Amy and the stage manager. Aside from Philip, who rarely came to rehearsals, Walter liked the troupe. He felt at home in the makeshift theater, home to the Rockford Community Players. When they first started rehearsing they had to dance around the set of the current production,
Bye Bye Birdie
. Walter got a charge out of being a prince from timeless fairyland in a living room with an orange plastic sofa and a pink phone. He amused his fellow dancers by playing a galliard on Conrad Birdie’s electric guitar, Renaissance for most of the way, with a Buddy Holly twang.

The girl who danced Clara, Nancy Sherwin, had thick thighs, which her skirt would obscure, and large breasts, which her chemise would not. She was a big-hearted floozy at sixteen, a girl who couldn’t
even take her own stardom seriously. Walter guessed she realized she was in Rockford, no reason to get excited. She laughed whenever anyone meant to be funny, a great musical flutter on one note. She laughed if the joke fell dead. She was generous that way, her flabby mouth hanging open, waiting for the punch line, waiting to spring her cadenza. She laughed when Walter put his hands around her size-sixteen Spanky Pant waist, when she wobbled around in her nearly motionless turns. On the lifts she meant to help him, getting a running start where she could, coming at him like a bag of wet cement.

Despite her size and her heft, she was graceful. In the slower variations, if she took the time, she occasionally moved Walter with her poignant and miraculously elongated arabesques. What he chiefly admired her for, however, was her unrelenting exuberance, her notion that everything was equally hilarious and the apparent absence of any deeper self that was sensitive to injury. He thought she would have found it funny that he borrowed Daniels weights and lifted them every morning before school in order to get in shape for their pas de deux. He knew she would have laughed not at the need, not at herself, but at the thought of scrawny little Walter shaking as he hoisted the barbells overhead and held them there for three short seconds.

Every evening Miss Amy led them through a few warm-up exercises to the music on a scratched record. When she taught them the steps to the ballet, she sang the melodies, keeping the beat going by clapping if she had to interrupt the tune to call out a correction, picking up the strain at its proper place when she came back to her role as accompanist. In later years Walter likened the project to a Special Olympics event, the dancers’ persistence and enthusiasm in part compensating for their disabilities. In the course of the rehearsals, he felt that he shouldn’t be enjoying something that was so far from being even second-rate. And yet when he forgot to worry about the production as a work of art he threw himself into it wholeheartedly. He loved his blue velvet tunic that came midthigh, the matching blue blouse with cream-colored satin cuffs and a silver sequined V at the neck, and his tights that had sequins sewn in clusters all the way to the ankle.

The first time he put on the suit he stood on the toilet seat at the theater, kicking at the stall door to keep it open, so that he could see the
mirror over the sink. He couldn’t take his eyes off himself. Miss Amy finally had to call from the outside, “Walter, hon, have you died in there?” Kicking the creaking stall door open wider so he could see his whole body in the coming gesture, he put his hand to his breast and finding a lower voice, an imperious tone, he said, “Be out in a moment.”

He thought to talk to his mother about the quality of the production. He couldn’t have said that he needed someone to give his participation in
The Nutcracker
a blessing. He knew only that he wanted to ask Joyce a question he hadn’t yet framed. Every day, when she dropped him off outside the theater he turned to her, wanting to ask, Is this really all right? She was always staring out past the windshield, as if she’d come to a stop for no reason, as if she might start up and without thinking drive until she got to the West Coast. “Well,” he’d say, “bye, Mom. See you at nine-thirty.” She’d turn to him, remembering that he was with her. He could see that she hardly knew what he was doing: she sometimes could not remember why they were in Rockford. She’d leave him on the curb and drive off, to the library, she said. To do what? he wondered. He pictured her sitting in a carrel, putting her head down, like a high school student, and sleeping until whatever was left of her mother instinct told her to wake.

A week before the first performance, on a Sunday night, Walter walked over to Sue Rawson’s to return a stack of
Dance Magazines
he’d borrowed. He could see her in the living room through the sheer curtains. She was on her chaise longue, her half-glasses on her nose, looking at the ceiling. He could hear Maria Callas singing Violetta through the brick walls of the house. Sue Rawson had always professed to be a Renata Tebaldi fan, and therefore she couldn’t love or even listen to Maria Callas. It was impossible. The two divas were archenemies, and a serious opera lover had to choose. Was Sue Rawson a secret worshipper of Callas? He considered leaving the magazines in her mailbox on the porch, or else slipping them between her door. If they got stolen he would be in trouble, but if he interrupted her holy and treacherous moment he might be in bigger trouble. He would have to take the magazines back home and return them another night, face charges of their being overdue. He was standing on the stoop, thinking of those things, shifting back and forth, when she opened the door.

“I thought I saw you out here,” she said.

“You’re listening to Callas!” he bleated.

“And you are standing on my doorstep. I wish you’d come in.”

He wiped his feet thoroughly, squatted to take off his shoes and tiptoed into her foyer. “Do you like her?”

“Like? I don’t know if I like any of them. I don’t think it’s ever been a matter of liking. But now I think I’ve grown weary of idols.”

“Oh,” he said. She had never spoken of fatigue, never wavered in an opinion. He hadn’t known before that she believed in opinion, that such a thing existed for her. “Oh,” he said again.

“You’re tired.” She came closer, removing her glasses to get a better view. He could see that she was concerned, and he remembered that all of the relatives were worried about Daniel, and that maybe by association she was worried about him.

“I’ve been having a lot of rehearsals,” he said. “For this
Nutcracker
thing I’m in.”

“Nutcracker
—thing? What does that mean? Either it’s
The Nutcracker
or it isn’t.”

He squinted at the green tile. He didn’t think he had the skill to describe the Rockford Ballet to Sue Rawson. He glanced at her quickly and looked back to the floor. Her mouth had softened, perhaps as a result of the music, or his own presence. He wasn’t sure he was seeing straight. He hadn’t ever noticed such a kind expression on her face. She looked almost warmhearted. He had thought her charitable on occasion, and always knowledgeable, always interesting. That benevolence might be a part of her character, an inborn quality, had never occurred to him.

“I—I—I’m not certain what it is, or if I should be in it,” he said. “I’m a little confused about it, actually.”

He shut his eyes, waiting for her to snap at him. He had committed the sin of doubt, and in addition he had misjudged her. She had never been tender in his company. He felt her bony hand on his shoulder; she was saying, “Come in—here, let’s turn this racket off, and you tell me about it.
Why
shouldn’t you be in the company?”

They were in the living room, and she was lifting the needle off the record. He sat on the edge of the blue-and-cream-striped sofa that happened to be the exact colors of his Prince costume. He had never
spoken confidentially to her before. He didn’t know how she could suddenly have learned to look so concerned without practice. “Well,” he said, considering as he drew out the word whether he should go any further. “It’s just that—” The new soft and anxious droop of her lip made him want to confess. “It’s just that it’s a tacky little production.”

He’d said it. Those were the words he’d tried to say to Joyce on all the trips to and from Rockford. As he spoke he knew that he could not stand having Sue Rawson watch him partnering his ton of bricks. He did not want her to see him in his tights, pointing his bargey feet.
Oh, God, what could keep everyone he knew away?
That friends and relations would come to see the performance had never been real to him until that moment. “I mean tawdry,” he cried. “Really tawdry.”