The Short History of a Prince (28 page)

“Some of my students don’t believe in love,” Walter said. “A lot of them live with one parent, which probably explains their skepticism. I suppose I learned about real adult love from my parents. Not about ecstasy, per se, but about the quiet, unheralded splendors of a shared history. There are kids at Otten High who have nothing but cynicism for their own bodies, for their own lives. I have to constantly remind myself that I don’t care what they think of my teaching performance art—how much energy it takes, not to care! The other day, just for the hell of it, I recited To His Coy Mistress’ to my toughest class, the seventh hour. And Sharon, the head slut of the school, says audibly, in a fakey under-her-breath way, ‘So why didn’t she just fuck him?’ On one
hand I was pleased that she’d listened and understood, and on the other hand the whole place went to pieces.” “God, Walter!”

“That class is always on the edge, just about to explode. But if I can snag them, if I can harness their energy, sometimes they actually go forward. It takes all my might and my cunning. In the middle of their uproar I ran around the room handing out paper and pencils—I have to provide for them because half of them don’t come prepared. I told them to write a love letter, a letter of persuasion, to try to entice someone to go out with them, without using any profanity, without being vulgar, I’d flunk them on the spot for crudeness and swearing. The idea was to use wit to get what they wanted. You can see every teenage emotion cross their faces at a time like that. Some don’t know what to say, how much to give away. Some go blank and some can only think of their dicks. The good girls start writing and don’t look up until the bell rings.”

“Can you imagine Mr. Reynolds reciting a love poem or giving us that assignment? It would have made him blush.”

“Yes, but we were well behaved and somewhat eager and furthermore we could read. He didn’t have to veer from the textbook to appeal to our imaginations.”

“You’ve given me an idea, do you know that? I’ll buy the
Norton Anthology
this afternoon, and at dinner I’ll open it, like it’s the Bible, and read out loud, ‘To His Coy Mistress.’ ”

Walter sat up straight and with the rectitude of a clergyman recited, “ ‘Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball, / And tear our pleasures with rough strife.’ ”

“And don’t think of your wife and three children, Lester, Lester, Lester.” She pulled her hair out of its rubber band, and it fell around her. She had more hair than Walter thought could be contained by one thin band. “I wonder,” she said, “if he loves me. Lester’s an awful name, what you’d call a pig if you were a girl growing up on a farm.”

“Has he seen you dance?”

“Once. The time we met, in Houston.”

“And what was it? What were you performing?”

“Jewels.”

“ ‘Diamonds,’ you danced ‘Diamonds’?”

“My part. Farrell’s part, and my part.”

“There’s no doubt, then. He loves you.”

They walked up Michigan Avenue, arm in arm. The gold candles wound with plastic greens were still strapped to the streetlights, along the avenue, left over from Christmas. The sun was shining and the wet sidewalks were crackly underfoot with salt. Susan was wearing a long, heavy camel coat that was too big for her, and on anyone else would have looked dowdy. She was all elegance in the coat and her white beret, just as she had been at ten in a black leotard. She could not possibly have needed the coat in Florida. Walter wondered if she’d lugged it from home, or, miraculously, found it in the closet at the hotel. She had always seemed to have what was appropriate, necessary, he thought, and then, amending that idea he said to himself that she had always had the enviable ability to claim what she needed.

“You know,” she said, pulling him closer, “I finally figured out that you let me win some of those music games. It was nice of you, by the way.”

“It made you so mad to lose,” he said. “I had to give you victory sometimes, purely out of self-defense.”

She frowned, looking at him. “I used to have to win back then. I thought I had hidden that unpleasant trait, but you’ve always known me. I think Daniel’s death forced me to sort things out, to realize that winning is beside the point. I did love beating you, though. I cheated to win, Walter. Sometimes, I cheated.”

“I know you did, darling.”

“I would have hated me, if I were you. Do your parents still have the neighborhood Christmas party? I loved all those strange people, poor Billy rocking back and forth with his hand in his mouth, drooling into the candies. Your aunt Jeannie trying to get her children to perform. You could just tell Sue Rawson always wanted to drive a spear through her heart.”

“Exactly,” Walter said. “That’s the whole problem with Lake Margaret. Sue Rawson wants to punish everyone because God gave her a twit for a sister. She’s had to share the place with Aunt Jeannie for so
long and she has finally come to the end of her rope. If she knew she wouldn’t get caught she’d just go over to Ted and Jeannie’s house after dark. With her concealed weapon in her pocket, she’d walk in the basement door, make her way to the bedroom and blow her little sister’s brains out. But even that wouldn’t be as satisfying as this Lake Margaret deal. She’s going to torture Jeannie slowly, make her pay. Either she thinks that everyone in the family is somehow going to understand why she’s doing it, and not take it personally, and excuse her, or she figures we’ll all be mad at her forever and she won’t care, because she’ll have so much personal, lifelong satisfaction from skewering Jeannie. Whatever happens, she’s going to make about four hundred thousand dollars and possibly get revenge on top of it.” “It’s so sad, to lose a place like that.”

“It’s not gone yet,” he said, “but it’s a lot of money to raise. I haven’t told you the latest twist. It’s as if all of this, in a perverse way, has come, not exactly full circle, but close to it. So, my cousins, those who are professionals, are in hock in the suburbs and don’t want to go deeper, and the others don’t have money, period. We are carpenters, aspiring actresses, teachers. I have about five hundred dollars in a savings account in Oak Ridge. My parents can spare maybe fifty thousand, but they have to think about their retirement. Aunt Jeannie and Ted have blown a lot of money on trinkets for Jeannie, and they’ve had to educate six children, and let’s not forget the obligatory cruise in the Bahamas every year. Couldn’t do without a big pleasure boat. At my mother’s behest I went to talk to Sue Rawson a few weeks ago. ‘If anyone can sway her, you can,’ Joyce says, which, believe me, did not make me feel hopeful. In I go to my aunt’s coach house, she sits me down in her pink Louis Quatorze chair, the way she used to when I was six years old. She cuts me off the minute I bring up the subject. ‘This is not a country shack,’ she says to me. ‘Do you realize what kind of responsibility is involved, taking care of an estate of this size? Do you understand what sort of expense is required, for maintenance, for taxes, what time commitment you will have to make?’ ”

“I’ve never liked her, Walter!”

“No one can stand her, but I’ve always insisted that she has a secret sentimental heart. I know she does. When I was eight she took me
to see the bronze dancer girl, the Degas in the Art Institute, and she could hardly control herself. She has great feeling, truly. I refuse to give up my opinion, even though by the end of the conversation she had reduced me to a pip. There was no point in telling her how important Lake Margaret is to me. I’m penniless! There was nothing I could say.

“I went home in a complete depression, but it wasn’t long after that Francie and Roger Miller came forward. Enter Dr. and Mrs. Miller. Center stage. Poor Roger, cultivating his lady’s slippers. He’s an eye doctor and doesn’t have anything else to do with his money. Raise his orchids and, yes, save Lake Margaret! It is Aunt Jeannie’s son-in-law who apparently is going to step in and rescue us floundering, useless nieces and nephews. And then, you see, Sue Rawson will have to live with the fact that the majority of the shares are going to belong to Jeannie’s faction. Everyone will have to tithe to Aunt Jeannie to use the bathrooms.”

“That’s almost more terrible than selling the whole place. It won’t ever feel like it’s yours again if that happens. I can just about hear the saccharine speech Jeannie makes about how much everyone is welcome to use the property as they always have.”

“It will bring tears to our eyes. Before we’re done blowing our noses and thanking her she’ll be screaming at the ingrates to pick up the wet towels on the floor.”

“Do you think,” Susan said, “do you think a person can manipulate destiny? No, no, no, forget I said that. I know we’re not supposed to ask questions like that now that we’re past sixteen.”

“Sure,” he said, answering it anyway. “Especially if you have a lot of money.”

They left it at that. They kept walking south, into the wind, holding on to each other and their hats. They stood outside the Louis Sullivan Building for a long time, looking at the stone, the mosaics in the walls and the grillwork on the doors. It had never occurred to them, when they were young, to look at the details. They peered into the Artists’ Café, where they used to drink coffee and talk about fate. It seemed not to have changed much, although the orange booths had been reupholstered with pale green vinyl. From the menu taped to the
door it looked as if the management still served no-nonsense Hills Brothers coffee, that it hadn’t succumbed to flavored brews that required expensive machinery.

Susan and Walter knew that the Kentons had moved the studio years before to the west side of the city, but they wanted to see where it had been, wanted to see through the window of the antique book dealer’s shop, back to what was theirs. In the hall on twelve they took off their coats and sat on the long wooden bench, under the same dim light, smelling, they thought, the same dust that was still circulating through the dark corridors. A single voice singing scales came up from the eleventh floor, and there was a violin in the distance, the sound of a Vivaldi concerto.

“It’s eerie, how the building hasn’t changed,” Susan said. “I wonder if I’ll ever see Franklin and Margery Kenton again. It’s so strange to think that there are certain people you won’t ever come across in your life, that for your purposes they are already dead. I don’t think they ever forgave me for leaving them for New York. They didn’t get to put their finishing touches on me.”

“No, it wasn’t that,” Walter said. “They held you responsible for Mitch quitting. That’s my theory, anyway.”

“That makes absolutely no sense. I have no idea why he stopped, when he had a full scholarship in New York, a dozen people at the school awaiting his arrival.” The voice student on eleven sounded like a ghost at her thin, endless scale. Mitch had quit, Walter knew, because he had spent enough time in the faggot world of the dance and he was ready to put on his britches, go after manly pursuits. He started to say that he thought Mitch had been afraid to be called a homo, but it wasn’t a conversation he really wanted to have and thankfully Susan interrupted. “Walter,” she said, “I don’t think I ever thought about your feelings.”

“You mean because I was the worst in the class?”

“No! You weren’t the worst.”

“That’s right, I hadn’t had polio like the Russian girl, Svetlana, with the humpback. The second worst, then.”

“It must have been horrible, not being in
The Nutcracker
, when we were. I knew, intellectually, of course, that you must have been hurt, but I couldn’t have begun to imagine how it felt.”

He noted her use of “We,” the old twosome, Mitch and Susan. “You missed my shining moment,” he said. “I was the Prince in the Rockford Ballet’s production. I was the star, not least because I had to partner a girl named Nancy whose real calling was the rodeo. She was a frisky three-hundred-pounder and I had to lift her fourteen times in the course of the first act.”

“You never told me about that! Did you? Did you tell me?”

“Of course not. I had a shred of dignity. And I enjoyed hiding that part of my life. My major secret, liking boys, was not only shameful, but I didn’t know how I was going to carry it forward into adulthood. I sometimes figured I’d live with my mother, both of us like old ladies eating rump roast on Sunday afternoons, buttoning up and taking a walk in the park. The secret of my
Nutcracker
seemed, in comparison, legitimate, clean, something to prize.”

“We should have come to see it—”

“Oh no, you would never have stopped laughing. I wouldn’t have lived it down. The only lie Sue Rawson ever told me occurred directly after the performance. She praised my dancing. She said I was good and I chose to believe her. She was being especially nice to me because Daniel was sick. It was her good deed, on a par with helping a senior citizen across the street or having a sick dog put to sleep. After her compliment I got this idea that you thought about the Rockford Ballet, that you glorified it.”

“I don’t know what was on my mind,” she said breezily. “Do you think Mitch wonders about us? Do you think we cross his screen every now and then?” She leaned against Walter, waiting for his answer.