The Short History of a Prince (22 page)

“Yes, Walter,” Sue Rawson declared. “You were.”

What had she said? She thought he was good. Had he heard her correctly? It was Sue Rawson who had said so. She’d come out and said that he was good. Sue Rawson never lied, not even for the purposes of standard politeness. She didn’t know how to lie; Joyce often made the comment that Sue Rawson’s frankness was refreshing only up to a point. She had said he was good. She wouldn’t have said he was good if she hadn’t really believed it. “She said I was good,” he whispered. “I was good, she said I was.” He did not speak for the rest of the trip.

He went up to his room that night, took off all his clothes, climbed into bed and hugged himself. He had danced onstage with a woman; no one had laughed at him—Miss Amy, on the contrary, had praised him, praised his gestures, his turns, his necessarily shortened leaps across the small stage. She had been with the Joffrey Ballet, or maybe she’d just gone to a few performances when she’d visited New York once. In any case, she knew what she was talking about. And Sue Rawson had admired his dancing. He wondered if he was better than
he’d given himself credit for after all his years of practice, and he considered that governing his life there might be a spiritual or religious logic. It might be that a person was not allowed to have desire, the way he did, to do a thing, and in the end not be given the ability to carry through. Maybe there was some kind of God, the great I AM who did not tolerate the sort of misery Walter had so far suffered on his path to adulthood. He was a dancer, in his heart, in the pith of his soul, never mind his feet, his ankles, his knees. He had become a prince, in spite of the vehicle, in spite of the Rockford Ballet. He had come through with flying colors, Arie Crown Theater be damned.

Perhaps the all-merciful God also did not allow someone to love another person as much as Walter loved Mitch, and not have the feeling returned, strength for strength. He wondered if he had taken leave of his senses, or if self-satisfaction always came at the expense of sanity. He said out loud, “I don’t care.” He felt across his chest and along the ruff of black hair that ran down his stomach, and he thought that his skin was nice to touch, that his was a fine, responsive body. He wondered why on earth he shouldn’t hold out a hope for happiness.

Susan and Mitch could not come to see any of the five performances of Walter’s
Nutcracker
. They were dancing thirty-two of their own on the cement stage of the Arie Crown Theater at the McCormick Place in Chicago. Their production was sponsored in large part by the Chicago Tribune, and there were in addition many distinguished benefactors of the performing arts who had made the ballet possible. The Christmas production was Chicago’s seasonal pride and joy. Because Walter did not talk about his role, because he saw very little of his friends that month, he wondered if they might possibly have an exalted opinion of Miss Amy’s
Nutcracker
. He hoped they did. They may have imagined that all of Rockford’s resources went into the costumes and sets, that it was a semiprofessional production in a high school auditorium, on a real proscenium stage, rather than the makeshift sheets of plywood with incongruous joints at the Community Theater. He once tripped on an uneven seam and almost broke his neck. He never told Mitch or Susan that he was the Prince, that Nancy was as heavy
as she was flexible. He felt a little smug, holding the secret of what seemed to him to have some aspects of triumph. It was too bad, of course, that Mitch, the Mouse King down at Arie Crown, had to wear a cumbersome headdress that came to his nipples, and a stuffed gray velvet bubble around the rest of him that made him look like a tub. It was a shame that no one could see him for himself. As for Susan, she would be a dead ringer for a snowflake in Act I, dancing as if she’d come sifting from the chill blue heavens. She was to wear a white cap that was all wired up with pom-poms. Forty minutes later, in Act II, she’d reappear as a dewy yellow rose, wearing a petal on her head, no trace of her Arctic beginnings.

When Walter was ordering a ticket from Susan over the telephone for the Arie Crown production, Daniel turned in his chair at the kitchen table and waved one hand. “I’d like to go,” he called.

“Huh?” Walter said.

“Could you please get a ticket for me?”

“What for? You already saw
The Nutcracker.”

“No,” Daniel said. “I didn’t see the one downtown.” He was fighting a sore throat, and when he swallowed he winced. “I saw yours, but not Susan’s. I didn’t see the professional troupe.”

Walter held the receiver to his chest. He stared at his brother. “You don’t even like ballet,” he finally said.

Daniel coughed, swallowed, grimaced. He took a deep breath. “I like it now,” he said. “I like it a lot.”

“I’m getting complimentary tickets, you know. She might not even have extra—”

“You there?” Susan said on the line, her voice going into Walter’s brown sweater.

“Could you, ah, make that two?” Walter said, looking away from his brother. Daniel was sitting with a blanket over his lap, dwarfed by his enormous bowl of Life cereal. “I don’t know why,” Walter said into the phone. “He says he wants to see it.”

The Rockford
Nutcracker
ran for only the first two weeks of December, because Miss Amy had to go to Florida to spend the holidays with her aged parents. Susan had invited Walter to use one of her precious complimentary tickets for the Chicago production, and he couldn’t think of a good excuse to decline. When Daniel wanted to go
along she’d said, “How wonderful! Of course I can find another,” and it was settled. There was no way out. They went on the third Sunday of the month, a matinee, and it was no great occasion for Walter to sit through another version of the same old thing. Act I: overtired children at a party, the arrival of a cranky bachelor uncle who messes with magic, a battle with the mice, good versus evil, a prince is born, the journey through the snow toward Intermission. Act II: The interminable entertainment. Dancing Chocolates, Coffee, Tea, Russians, Marzipan, Bonbons, Waltzing Flowers, the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Prince, the End.

He put on a pair of blue jeans and a sweatshirt with cut-off sleeves. He couldn’t have said why he felt so irritated when Daniel came down the stairs wearing light gray wool pants, a starched white shirt, a nubby green tie and the Harris tweed sport coat Robert had brought him from Scotland the year before. The radiation had made some of his hair fall out, and he had combed and fluffed it to cover the patchy areas. He stood in the hall waiting for Joyce. It seemed to Walter that Daniel was always waiting for Joyce, that there was nothing he did anymore without Mother in tow. He looked so scrubbed and pressed, as if he were heading out to teach Sunday school or sell brushes and knives door-to-door. Walter thought of asking him why he was dressed like a John Bircher. Instead, he made an elaborate show of putting on the old wool jacket he hadn’t worn in a couple of years, the one cousin Maxi had dragged through a puddle up at the lake a few Thanksgivings before.

Joyce either didn’t notice Walter’s clothes, or she didn’t have the strength to care. It all boiled down to the same thing in Walter’s book: she was out to lunch. She did say that there were too many germs on the filthy el train for Daniel and that she’d drive the two of them downtown. As they got into the car Walter mumbled, “Right, Mom. We sit for thirty minutes in a hermetically sealed automobile so we can spend hours in a closed room with ten thousand people, ten thousand conduits of any number of viruses, bacteria, airborne- and moisture-borne single cells traveling from person to person as we enjoy the ballet.”

Joyce said, “Make sure your door is locked, will you please?”

When he and Daniel walked down the aisle at the Arie Crown, Walter said to himself, It isn’t that exciting. Nothing that terrific about
the blue plush seats, the long blue curtain, the orchestra warming up in the pit, the hawkers in the lobby trying to sell the pricey ballet programs with glossy photographs in color. It isn’t really so much, the velvet, the live music, the little stagestruck girls spinning in the aisles in their Sunday best. It doesn’t after all add up to something far greater than the sum of the Rockford Ballet. The accessories can’t replace spirit and originality. Or pep. He’d never been much of an advocate of pep before, but it had its place, as did determination and grit. He’d stand up in favor of pep and grit any day.

Daniel went out before the ballet started and paid five dollars for the program. He sat next to Walter as they waited, reading the magazine intently. Walter had brought along
A Passage to India
and was furiously underlining with his yellow marker. When the lights went down he again went through his catechism: It’s not so much, the music, the larger stage, the conductor wearing a tuxedo, the balconies, the fifty-foot Christmas tree.

During the first ten minutes of the performance Daniel leaned forward, straining to see around the heads in front of him. He sat back when he realized that no one he knew was going to appear for a while. The padded seats were restful and he was pleasantly warm in his suit. He fell asleep, and so he missed Mr. Kenton as Drosselmeyer, missed the exaggerated hobble, the triangular fake eyebrows and the painted frown that gave Walter’s teacher the look of the Devil. Daniel’s head rolled around from side to side and came bouncing down his brother’s shoulder and arm.

Walter shook him off. “Wake up,” he whispered. “You wanted to come, now snap to it.” He could not remember ever being so uncomfortable. His big brother’s head was heavy on his arm, and furthermore he was drooling on Walter’s sweatshirt. He couldn’t keep his eyes open for more than ten seconds at a shot. “Close your mouth,” Walter said out loud, moving away so that Daniel’s head jerked back. A woman from behind snarled at both of them for the disturbance. Walter wondered for the first time if Daniel’s spit had the sickness in it, if the illness, the unidentified disease or plague, or whatever it was, could infect other people, could get him.

He did not fail to notice that when Susan appeared onstage Daniel suddenly came to. It was as if Daniel had a homing device,
Susan radar. She bourréed through the falling snowflakes and his eyes popped open. He sat up, leaned left and right to see, and poked Walter for the binoculars. “I’m not done,” Walter said, shutting his eyes into the opera glasses, seeing nothing but the darkness of his own hateful self. It was far more important that
he
watch Susan up close, he whispered, so that he could comment on her technique, give her pointers.

He had seen the Arie Crown Production four times, in previous years, and he could have said halfway into the fifth occasion that he was not particularly impressed. There was nothing unusual about it or interesting, he remarked afterward to Daniel. And weren’t they all a little off? Mr. Kenton hit one note as Drosselmeyer, had no range. The children were cloying in their sweetness. The Sugar Plum Fairy was chilly in her delivery, and had lousy balance. As for her consort, he looked as if they’d found him in a doorway on South Wabash, as if they’d hardly washed him off before they’d propped him up and pushed him onstage.

They were making their way out of the theater as Walter gave his critique. He was speaking as much to the crowd at large as he was to Daniel. “You rely on children to enthrall an audience and you really don’t have much when all is said and done. Did you hear the horns, by the way? Did you hear the squeak during the Grand Pas de Deux? Those guys are making union wages and two of them fired off in different directions at the same time! I’d feel much more secure if it wasn’t live, if the music was canned. That way a person doesn’t have to worry about an overpriced professional blowing it.”

Daniel was studying the ballet program while they waited in the crowd to get out into the lobby. He said to Walter’s back, “I thought it was good.”

“You would,” Walter snorted.

Once they’d squeezed through, out the theater doors, Walter pressed forward toward the North Exit, where Joyce had said she would wait for them. Daniel clutched at his brother’s sleeve, holding him in place, saying, “Aren’t we—can’t we go backstage to see Susan? And Mitch?”

“What are you talking about?” Walter spoke with indignation and disbelief, as if Daniel had suggested they rob a convenience store. He
couldn’t help it. He had no desire to see his friends in their makeup, the relatives and admirers circling them, girls in pigtails reaching out to touch the hem of their garments. First, his brother had developed a lump, and another, and then he’d become some kind of goody-goody ballet aficionado. Maybe Mrs. Gamble’s theory was correct: Daniel was deficient in niacin and on his way to losing his mind. Walter stopped and faced Daniel while the crowd banged around them. “There is no point in going to see them,” he said. “They’re probably already gone.”

Daniel took hold of Walter’s arms, to steady himself as much as to implore. There was a tear trembling on the edge of his lid. Walter noticed for the first time how large his eyes had become. They used to be smaller, before he got sick. “You slept through most of it,” Walter accused. “What would you tell them? Great place to sleep off a cold? They don’t want to know that you missed their dancing. They worked hard and you sat snoring.”