The Short History of a Prince (21 page)

She said calmly, “And you’re embarrassed, like to want to die, is that right?”

He sniffled and nodded.

“Is there anything positive about the production, anything at all that’s worth your while?”

“There is! That’s the perplexing part for a snob like me. I sort of enjoy it. I hate to admit it, but I like the people. And I have a pretty good time at rehearsals. If I were going to see it, I’d know right as the curtain rose that it was terrible. But being in the middle of it I imagine that there’s a little bit of, well, magic. Luster. I’m probably deluding myself; I know I am.” He looked down at his black socks. “I really hope you don’t come,” he said to the floor.

“Why do you dance, Walter? Why do you take lessons?”

He was panting from the strain of the conversation. She was asking all the difficult questions. “I know I’m not any good,” he whispered. He lifted his head and saw, across the room, the far wall with the Degas prints in gilt frames.

“So why do you keep on,” she persisted, “if you think you’re not any good?”

“Because,” he choked, “I
feel it.”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“I feel the ideas and the patterns and the abstraction of the beauty, and—”

“Yes, you do. And if you feel the meaning strongly enough you’ll no doubt convey something of it. I don’t think you can help it. I’d
wager that you enjoy the rehearsals of this so-called tawdry production because you’re communicating. In other words, you’re succeeding. What part do you have?”

His mother had not even told her own sister that he had the starring role. “I’m, ah, the Prince.”

“That’s what I thought. You’ll make a splendid Prince. You have the right sort of nose, and perfect hair.” She tilted her head, smiling, as if nothing were more natural. “A prince,” she declared, “should always have curly dark hair.”

He couldn’t think whether to say Thank you or How do you know? His ideal was the blond, blue-eyed type. He nodded at her requirement. “I guess,” he said. “That’s been the fun of it—trying to act as if everyone should pay homage, make an obeisance as I pass. It hasn’t been all that hard, really, to imagine that I’m—”

She laughed, and then he laughed too, at the idea of the latent prince in him so close to the surface, so accessible.

“If you’d like me not to come I certainly won’t, but do let me know if you change your mind. I wish that ballet school of yours had recitals for students other than the most advanced. We relatives are always looking for excuses to get out.”

He could almost have nestled in her bosom. She was delivering great comfort, comfort of the sort normally dispensed at the eleventh hour by fairy godmothers and deities. Inviting her was the least he could do. “No, no,” he said. “You can come if you want.” He immediately wished he could take his words back. “It’s not much, as I said, not really much of a ballet, even though our hearts are in the right places.”

“I look forward to it.” She slapped her hands to her knees. She stood up, and in that motion the pliant lips went tight. Her former self, the Sue Rawson in which everything is cut and dried, wiped her glasses with a man’s cotton handkerchief. “You caught me listening to Callas, didn’t you?” She looked at him critically, waiting for his admission.

“I didn’t catch you—I could hear it from the—”

“I only listen to her so that when I go back to Tebaldi I appreciate her gift. I listen to Callas, in other words, for perspective.”

He wasn’t ready for the real aunt to speak to him. He wanted the other to stay, even if she was an impostor. He would have liked five more minutes of the intimacy that already seemed long ago, that seemed exquisite in his memory.

The night of the first performance, Walter’s family drove out to Rockford in the station wagon. Daniel, Walter and Joyce sat in the backseat, and did not speak, and Robert and Sue Rawson sat in the front discussing their declining stocks in the Jewel Food Corporation. Aunt Jeannie and Uncle Ted had so many children of their own participating in Christmas activities that they were not going to be able to attend the ballet. Walter, pretending to sleep, prayed for his father to lose control of the car and drive into the meridian. It occurred to him that he was often wishing for death or thinking of death. He should try to kick the habit and become more cheerful, become someone like his Aunt Jeannie. He opened his eyes just as they were driving under a viaduct.
Drive into it
, he willed.
Hit it! Smash! Break!

They arrived at the theater, each of them in one piece. As Walter was getting out of the car Daniel said, “Good luck.”

“Yep,” Walter said.

“At the New York City Ballet,” Sue Rawson instructed, “they say
‘Merde’
for luck on opening night.”

“This is Rockford,” Walter muttered.

He stood on the curb watching them speed away to the Howard Johnson coffee shop. He gave up a short prayer, again for saving grace, for a hoodlum to come and gun him down. And he could finish off Franklin Kenton too, put a bullet through his sinewy gut. It was cold, and he finally turned and went into the building. Without speaking to anyone, he did his plies at the barre Miss Amy had installed in the greenroom, put on his costume and makeup, and his terry-cloth robe for warmth, and went out into the dark theater to wait. It was a shallow stage, and the set, a Victorian living room, only made the dancing more difficult. The plastic tree in the corner had arrived two days before and the performers hadn’t adjusted to its presence. In
forty-five minutes the lights would go down and the pageant would begin, taking Clara from the Christmas Eve party, through the land of snow, to the kingdom of candy and love. The little girls in their dresses and ruffled pantaloons and new ballet slippers, their hair in ringlets, were onstage skipping and shouting. One of them knocked a red bauble off the tree and it shattered. Louie, the stage manager, shouted at them and shooed them back to the greenroom.

Nancy Sherwin was charging around the theater, indiscriminately giving everyone kisses and flowers. Walter slunk into his seat in an effort to avoid her and also to get into character. I am a prince, he said to himself, beginning his meditation. “Where’er I walk,” he sang under his breath, “cool gales shall fan the glade. Trees, where I sit, shall crowd into a shade.… And all things flourish where’er I turn my eyes.” He felt better by the time Nancy spied him and came rushing to his seat. “Walter, Walter, Walter,” she cried, “there you are! You’re practically on the floor. Are you hiding?” She thrust a posy at his nose, threw her chubby white arms around him and breathed heavily into his chest as he sat. She was assaulting all of the cast members and there was nothing to do but bear her embraces with princely stoicism. “Where’er I walk,” he repeated, “cool gales shall fan the glade.” He was as ready as he was ever going to be. Let his parents, his brother and Sue Rawson come forth and see him in his courtly sequined tights and blue eye shadow.

Right before Walter went on, he thought of his father. Robert McCloud had always professed to live and let live, but he had every now and then made it a point to give fatherly advice. It was important to attack a job, carry through and be precise. Whatever a person chose to do was immaterial; it was Process, not Product, that built character. Robert delivered the talks as if he really wanted to say et cetera, et cetera, as if he was going through the motions of his paternal duty, giving the required speech. Walter understood that the message was at once stuffy and true. The family had watched a television special once called
Dancing, a Man’s Game
, a show that compared male ballet dancers to great athletes, and Walter knew that Robert at least had respect for the Process of ballet. It would be all right, dancing in front of his father, Walter thought, as he waited for his entrance.

He performed that first night expressly for Sue Rawson. He checked himself in the mirror when he was offstage, and he thought his curly dark hair actually gave him a touch of the rogue. That was all to the good. He wanted his Prince to be decent, self-effacing and dignified in the face of folly, but not so decent that he was deadly. Surely he looked worthy of a princess, and in fact worthy of a higher-class princess than Nancy Sherwin could ever be; he was a young man any queen would be happy to have as a son-in-law.

It went well, until the second act, when Nancy and Walter were sitting on their bench, the throne, watching Madame Bonbonnière in her voluminous hoopskirt. Walter turned to his partner, to whisper conversationally, as Miss Amy suggested they do. They were supposed to be delighted and absorbed for forty-five minutes, for the remainder of the ballet. He bent to meet her glance, trying to be lofty and loving at the same time. Her eyes were misty. She was gazing at him with a terrible hopeful look in her eyes. “Walter,” she murmured.

“What?” he said abruptly, out loud.

“Wouldn’t you like—”

He pointed to the stage, to the little children coming out of Madame’s enormous skirt.

“Walter,” she drawled again.

If he wasn’t mistaken she was after him. He edged away from her, making a mental note of the exits, including the fire door. Everyone, from the peasant on up to the nobleman, needed individual space. He scraped at a crusty spot on his tunic, wiped his nose and mumbled something about the cute dancing kiddies.

“Yes,” she said, snuggling into his side.

He could drop her in their last pas de deux, he thought, when he hauled her around the stage, she with her dimpled legs crossed. She would sustain a blow to her head, and Miss Amy could on the spot choreograph a next act, Clara goes to Oz. Why would Nancy want him? he wondered. They’d been thrown together like two people left in a shipwreck, but that did not mean they had to fall in love. Maybe she was the kind of girl who liked it any way she could get it, the sort of good girl who gave blow jobs to boys no matter their preference, and still thought of herself as virginal. If she tried it on him, if she
came at him he’d draw his sword, he’d sic Mrs. Gamble on her. A prince, of course, would put a brotherly hand on her shoulder, and then run for cover. He was going to bolt the minute the performance was over, get out of the place before she could corner him and crawl up his doublet. There was the possibility that he had developed a swelled head and that she wasn’t making advances. He had not had any experience with girls, but he could detect a new quality in her husky whisper, a different pressure in the way she leaned on him, leading with her breasts. She squeezed his hand and breathed on him all the way up to the curtain call. “Where’er I walk, cool gales shall fan the glade.” He kept singing the Handel to himself. He remained in character until the bitter end, bowing only with the nod of his titled head.

The family waited for him in the vestibule. He quickly gathered his things in the greenroom. He had never kissed anyone, much less let a person touch him underneath his clothes. Recently he’d found a men’s magazine and it had given him all the pleasure he could stand, no need for Nancy to leap from the folded curtains and goose him. Without saying good-bye to the company, he slung his bag over his shoulder and darted out the door. He had removed all his makeup and put on a stocking hat in the hope that no one would notice him, that he could ditch and somehow find his own way home. He’d walk if he had to, or jump into a boxcar, or hitchhike with a kindly truck driver.

Before he’d taken three steps into the lobby his father was beating him on the back. “You all did a lot of dancing up there,” he was saying. “A lot of complicated dancing. It must have been hot under those lights, but you looked cool as a cucumber. I don’t know how you learned that fancy footwork with nothing but the music to tell you what to do.”

“We’re so proud of you,” Joyce said, flashing that wide, false smile she’d been using for every occasion since Daniel had gotten sick.

Like a convoy, his family encircled Walter and moved him toward the front door. Walter was suddenly grateful for their protection, grateful for his father’s direct, ignorant compliments. There was nothing wrong with his father’s simplicity, and he forgave his mother her stock phrase, her unconditional pride.

Under the lights of the theater’s marquee, Sue Rawson shook Walter’s hand heartily. She was wearing a navy cape and a navy box hat that made her look like a Salvation Army sergeant. He was afraid to look at her, to read the message in her eyes:
It was awful
. Instead of receiving her silent communication he began to talk. He talked about Daniel’s loan of the graduated barbells, about developing strength in his upper body and lower back, about the little girl who tripped during the Bonbon variation. He did not stop talking. Halfway home he talked, in one continuous run-on sentence, about Miss Amy. What he didn’t know he fabricated. He leaned forward, his arms resting on the front seat, and spoke to Sue Rawson. He told her about Miss Amy’s short stint with the Joffrey Ballet, her knee injury, her marriage to her high school boyfriend who became a dentist, her gift to him of a ride in a hot-air balloon for his birthday, and the crash that killed him, the accusation by her in-laws that she’d murdered him, the opening of the studio, her desire to have a company. Daniel finally shook his arm and said, “Breathe, Walter. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you’re supposed to stop to take a breath now and then? I’ve been trying to get a word in, to say that you were good.”