The Short History of a Prince (42 page)

“Shit,” Mitch muttered.

“You’ll never say I do, I know. You’ll never admit it. I’m going to run to the mirrors and check.”

“You’re always going to be a homo!” Mitch called after him.

Walter paused outside the dressing room, considering that remark. Of course he was always going to be a homo. He had already figured out that his kind didn’t reach the age of twenty-one and automatically and genuinely become marriageable material. He stuck one fluttering arm back through the door, as if to say in swan language, So will you too be a cream puff, and he hiked up his skirts and went slap-slapping into the studio.

The late-afternoon sun filtered through the clouds over the lake, and in the long bank of mirrors it was hard to see where the gauze of the skirt ended and the glittering dust began. He was no more flat-chested than half of the girls. He looked terrific, he did! He tinkered with the undershirt on his head, tucking the sleeves into the roll of the crown. If only they could wear costumes for class, instead of the drab black tights and the plain white T-shirt. He turned his head to this side, to that, admiring himself. He did a jump step called a pas de chat, one foot to the knee, step, the other foot to the knee, a sideways leap, the step of the cat. The pointe shoes made a pleasing noise as they came to the floor, wood against wood, and the skirt followed him, floating, a beat behind his movements. He sang, bringing his arms over his head, crossing them down to his knees, wavering on his pointes. His every movement, he thought, expressed the agony of rejection and the spell of sorrow. Poor Odette, he danced, who loves so
purely and loses her chance of earthly happiness. He brought his trembling arms behind him, threw back his head, the way Odette does in both her passion and her grief. Mitch’s words came to him—“You’ll always be a homo”—and he thought too of the horrible things Susan had said to him at school. Daniel was lying in a steel hospital bed shoved up against a tiled wall, waiting to go from this world. How could that be real? Walter raised his voice and it cracked. Singing, dancing, he guessed, was the only way he could ever really communicate. It did cross his mind, as he so poignantly bobbled to his own strains, that he should be careful not to stay too long, one more look, and he’d pitter-patter back to the dressing room.

It was inevitable, he later thought, predictable, that Mr. Kenton flick on the lights and see him clearly. Under the white ball fixture Walter was no longer obscured by the deepening golden afternoon sunlight. He continued to move, shutting his eyes, laughing, as if he were already middle-aged and the scene was a past embarrassing moment. He had escaped the police in the alley, and Mitch, under his bed, had not been found out by Joyce and Robert. Still, it seemed so familiar, this getting-caught-in-the-light business. Mrs. Manka was standing behind Mr. Kenton, peering over his shoulder. Although it was April it was unseasonably cold. She looked like a Russian diplomat in her black-and-white-checked coat, with the big, black, plush fake-fur collar and a black fur hat.

“What in Sam Hill—” she began.

Mr. Kenton did not register surprise. “All right, then,” he said simply. He came forward, pulled at the thighs of his trousers with his thumbs and index fingers and sat himself down on the white bench with the blue cushion, where he always sat when he watched their combinations. “We’ll have Odile’s fouetté music, please, Agatha.”

Mrs. Manka seemed to be having trouble taking off her coat, or else, Walter thought, she was removing it reluctantly, stalling. She glanced at him once, shaking her head, pursing her lips, not a look of encouragement or amusement. He understood her to mean that the fouetté turns were difficult and that the man of the establishment did not have a forgiving temperament. There was no little pocket of mercy in Mr. Kenton and maybe he was going to give Walter a lashing he’d never forget, and who was to say that Walter didn’t deserve it?

“Come to the center, Odile,” Mr. Kenton said, clapping three times.

No, no! Walter was the good swan, Odette, not the bad swan. The wicked one had the hardest variations, the demanding turns. He was much better at expressing pain and misfortune; he couldn’t possibly convince anyone, even through the dance, that he was conniving, out to spoil a prince’s pleasure and happiness.

“Let’s see your thirty-two fouetté turns,” Mr. Kenton ordered. “You have two measures for preparation. About like this, Agatha.” He hummed the music, setting the speed. It was far slower than the recording, but faster than a novice could manage. Mrs. Manka quickly lit her cigarette and took a sustaining puff.

Walter felt as if he were wearing flippers as he came to the center, as if he were all equipment, suited up for a horrific dive. Fouetté turns are sharp whipping turns, one after the next. He was to do thirty-two of them without stopping, just as Odile does in
Swan Lake
, when she’s bewitching the Prince. He could sense the weight of the shoes but he didn’t think he could find his own feet. It might be possible to turn around and around on half-pointe, without rising up on his toes. Walter’s one strength in ballet was his ability to turn. It crossed his mind, just for an instant, that Mr. Kenton was appealing to his talent. But no, no, how could Walter forget? This was the hunter and his prey, the great big old cat with yellow teeth getting closer, closer, cornering the mouse, the resigned mouse, the I-am-already-dead mouse.

Mrs. Manka played her measures, and he did his preparation, arms to the front, arms and feet à la seconde, arms and feet to fourth position. He got three quarters of the way through the first turn when Mr. Kenton clapped to stop the music. “No, no, no, no. On pointe. You’re a swan now, remember? You’ve got the costume and the shoes, now do the dance, GIRL.”

Mrs. Manka again began the introduction. “And one and two and three and four,” Mr. Kenton shouted.

It is trying enough for a seasoned ballerina to successfully execute thirty-two fouettés. There was a brittle anger in Mr. Kenton’s voice as he counted. It’s a long way down to the ground from the twelfth floor, Walter thought, and his sleeves would not have much wing action to slow the fall. He felt as if his feet were laced up in cement blocks; the
numbness was rising from his ankles, spreading like dye along his calves. His hands were wet, his skin so cold, and the knocking of his chest was in his ears, overpowering the music. Those irregularities, he thought, meant that he was frightened.

“MOVE,” Mr. Kenton ordered.

Walter turned. He went around in a burst, and again, and a third time. His feet were going to snap at the ankle with a few more rotations, he was sure of it, and he’d have to dance on the raw bleeding stub of a leg. He fell after the sixth turn. He lay still in the pool of his skirt. He hardly knew if he was crying, didn’t want to feel his face to find out, couldn’t in any case locate his cheeks or his eyes, all of him to the top of his head packed into the shoes.

“GET UP,” Mr. Kenton shouted, with the force, the venom, of a sergeant. “Take it from the top, DEAR.”

“I don’t think I can—”

“FROM THE TOP.” He was standing, banging the cane against the wall, shouting at Mrs. Manka, and at Walter, shouting, “Faster, faster, faster.” Walter’s turning foot bent and he skittered across the floor.

“Center, sweetheart,” Mr. Kenton said with terrifying enunciation. “Again, lover.”

Walter dragged himself, hauled his feet, to the front of the studio. He was preparing for the turns when he saw Mitch at the door, Mitch’s right foot crossed over the left, Mitch resting against the jamb, Mitch’s lip curling, Mitch sniggering.

“AGAIN,” Mr. Kenton bellowed.

Walter looked at his teacher, at his flashing eyes, his red ascot bunched at his throat, that clot of color like a gaping wound. “It’s not going to be good,” his mother in her infinite wisdom had said the night before.

Why am I here? Walter thought. I need to go to the hospital. I need to see Daniel, my brother.

It’s not going to be good, sweetie
. He picked up his beaten, his quite dead, feet, and made for the door. He brushed against his friend, the one with the fiendishly long and hard winkie, the beauty of which he could only imagine because he had never been allowed to revel over it. He walked from the studio without hearing Mr. Kenton’s
invective, without listening to the demands to return, the threats, he supposed, and the insults. There were twelve flights of stairs, in the neighborhood of 240 individual steps and the walk around every landing. But he couldn’t stand there waiting for the elevator with Mr. Kenton on his tail and he certainly didn’t want to explain his girl getup to the elevator man. It was at the fifth floor that he felt his feet, suddenly, briefly, a stab of pain as if the nerves were finally being severed. His feet, he thought, were like two squashed hearts inside of Sonja Marendaz’s pointe shoes, shoes that had been made by an old man cobbler across the ocean in England. He went down and down, the bloody pulp sloshing in his slippers. When he got to the last marble flight he sat and scooted on his behind down each stair to the lobby, where many of the girls in his class were waiting for the elevator.

He had a fair idea that he looked like a crippled pigeon. The girls were too startled to squeal or laugh out loud, and he was grateful for the silence. He got himself upright and walked out the door to the street. It occurred to him as he crossed Van Buren that he couldn’t very well ride the el in the costume, and that he also could not go back to the studio to fetch his clothes. He stood on the pavement, the wind blowing his skirt up in the back. It was chilly and the tulle and satin weren’t much for warmth. He realized that he couldn’t ride the el anyway, because he didn’t have his wallet. There were red stains spreading from the pink satin toe on each foot towards the instep. He had no money. It would be the first time in history a person bled to death from a wound to the big toe. He supposed that the newspaper would call it suicide first and murder later, after Mrs. Manka came forward and told the police the truth.

He turned back and hobbled up the block to the Pick Congress Hotel. In front of the porters in their green pants and green vests and green top hats, he walked along the curb and got into the first taxi in the lineup. He had no choice but to lift his skirts modestly and climb into the car. It was perhaps there, outside the row of grand hotels, that Walter found in himself a confidence that was later to hold him in good stead in Otten. There was nothing to do but be a fool in as dignified a manner as he could muster. The driver did not look at him, did not say a word, as if every day a boy dressed as a wili got in his cab. Walter took off the slippers and although he tried to massage his feet,
one at a time, both of them remained in the shape of the shoe for the duration of the trip. The nails had come off seven of his toes and he let them bleed on the floor mat of the cab. He couldn’t think what would have happened if he’d stayed on, if Mr. Kenton had planned to beat him or make him dance until he broke a leg. He put his head back and tried to find rest in the thought that it was over, he had gotten away.

When they pulled up to 646 Maplewood Avenue thirty minutes later Walter told the driver to wait.

“You bet I’ll wait, kid, until I have every penny of the fare.”

He limped up the sidewalk and into the house and through the rooms, opening drawers and looking in pots, searching for cash. Joyce had so thoughtfully left ten dollars for pizza under the vase. “Bless you,” Walter whispered. He found three dollars in small change, and two dollars in Daniel’s wallet that had been on the counter for a month. He went back out in his costume and his bare feet. It was when he opened the car door and handed the money to the driver that the man at last took notice. He looked Walter up and down and said, “What’s the matter wich-you?”

“Is it extra for analysis, or do you do it for free?” Walter said, slamming the door.

In the following hour, in his living room, he considered killing himself by using a number of different methods. He didn’t exactly want to die, but living was not something he wished to continue. He would have liked to go elsewhere, not as a traveler or a runaway—just elsewhere; to sit and wait, until his life was over.

He found he could not walk. He was sitting at the bottom of the stairs in the hall, and he could not move. It would be impossible, then, to climb the three flights to pitch himself off the attic roof. It would be out of the question to get to the medicine cabinet, to the full bottle of aspirin. His parents did not own a gun, as far as he knew. He didn’t warm to the thought of stabbing himself with a butcher knife. It took more than enough effort just to take off his costume and ball it up and stuff it behind the piano. Getting his father’s trench coat off the hanger almost did him in, and he collapsed on the sofa before he finished threading the buckle. He would pass out, that’s what he would do. He had never fainted, and he didn’t know if it was something that could be willed. It would be best, if he was going to lose consciousness,
to go slowly, to music. He crawled to the stereo. If he could only manage to get the record on the turntable without standing, he’d have
Tosca
. It was worth doing for Tebaldi, never mind his bloody feet and all the rest of him that was hurt too.

When she came on in the second act singing “Vissi d’arte,” Walter, in a pile on the floor, lifted his head and weakly sang along with her, feeling the meaning as he never had before. “Love and music, these have I lived for, nor ever have harmed a living being.” He was with her all the way to the end. “Why, heavenly father, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Ten