The Short History of a Prince (45 page)

“So you’re a selfish pig.”

“Thank you. I have to go rehearse for
Mystery of the Dancing Princesses
, and tonight it’s the usual Dark Angel in
Serenade.”

“When I told you the story of my disgrace, you didn’t laugh. That’s to your credit. I was so grateful to you for not laughing, for not even cracking a smile, not a quiver, not a twitch. You looked at my naked toes, bald without their nails, and you didn’t flinch. You wept first, as I recall, before you laughed, when I demonstrated the fouettés. You had the purest response in word and in expression.”

“Oh good. Maybe I did do one thing right then, a long time ago. I have to hang up. I’m late already, for class. Have a terrific time at the prom. And I’ll even say a prayer for Mrs. Gamble before I go onstage,
and one for you, too. But if love doesn’t travel from live body to live body, my little prayer isn’t going to reach the dead.”

“We’re talking about Mrs. Gamble,” Walter said. “She’ll get it.”

Walter stood at the top of the bleachers during the grand march at the Otten High prom. The gym was unrecognizable, decorated in streamers, white lights strung around in potted trees, a red carpet underfoot and a chandelier hanging by ropes from the ceiling. There was nothing striking in the decor or the fashions to mark the year and it seemed to Walter that 1973 and 1996 were more or less interchangeable. A few of the boys had shaved heads and studs in their ears, but overall they were big and quiet and uncomfortable in their suits. As it had always been, and would always be, the girls could have passed for twenty-five with their hairdos and makeup and heels and slinky dresses, but the eagerness and shine belonged to their sixteen-year-old selves. There was so much talk about how students were different these days, but Walter wondered if anything fundamental had changed in twenty years. He wondered too, how long it would be before Otten sold single tickets or tolerated same-sex couples at their school dances, if such a thing would happen in his lifetime. Milwaukee, only a few hours away, was going to have its annual Pride Weekend at the end of the month, but Otten would certainly not feel any aftershock from the celebration.

He and Mrs. Denval watched the couples coming two by two up the gym floor and onto the stage. “Isn’t it disgusting, what they’re wearing?” Mrs. Denval shouted into Walter’s ear. “Look at Cheryl Borgelt—why, you can see her G-string.” The crowd went wild when Bill Pierce of the Otten Braves mounted the stairs with his date. He had opted for a classic black tux and crew cut. Walter resisted the urge to point out Bill’s elegance to Mrs. Denval. She took his arm and said, “Did you go to your prom, Mr. McCloud?”

He was still clapping for Bill, and without thinking he said, “Yes.”

“Oh, how nice. I don’t think it’s ever a good experience, but it’s always lovely, especially if you’re a girl, for the rest of your life to be able to say you went. Do you think all of our youngsters are going to go
home, or wherever they go after this dance, and have sexual intercourse?”

Walter choked on his 7-Up. “I don’t know. Probably some of them, Mrs. D., half of them? The ones you’d expect, and a few you wouldn’t, but not all, no, not everyone.”

“Did you, after your prom?”

“Of course not,” he said. “I was a late bloomer. Actually, if you must know, I have yet to bloom. I spent my high school career playing
Name That Tune
with my aged aunt.”

Walter had not gone to his prom or anyone else’s prom, but he hadn’t meant to lie to Mrs. Denval. When she asked him he had Said yes, because in a way he felt as if he’d experienced the dance. He had gotten more out of the prom the year he was fifteen than a high school function was capable of offering. Maybe, he considered, that was the true nature of a miracle, that a person could take riches from a thing that inside and out was empty.

After he stopped going to ballet class that April, after the
Swan Lake
fiasco, Walter began to visit Daniel at the hospital downtown. It was beyond the time when he could have established a friendship with his brother. Daniel slept fitfully, and when he woke he lay waiting for his next shot of morphine. He was sometimes in pain, crying softly, or he was groggy, or he was asleep. When Walter sat beside him trying to make conversation, Daniel was unfailingly polite, but Walter knew that if he’d had the energy he’d have stolen past them, gone to another room, curled up into himself, away from talk and food and emotion.

That first week Walter quit dancing, Susan had a sinus infection and was home sick. The week after, her grandmother in Phoenix died and the family went west. Walter was thankful for her absence, and afterward he wondered if she had somehow brought on her own sickness and her grandmother’s death, if she knew to stay at a distance.

In the hospital, after school, he sat on one side of the bed, across from his mother. Joyce was knitting, what he couldn’t tell. It was a shapeless pile, probably meant to be a man-size sweater. He assumed she was knitting to do something with her hands, instead of picking at
her cuticles, that she didn’t care what she made. She was long past fussing at Daniel to eat, but every few minutes she’d get up and swab his mouth with a cloth dipped in cold water, and she’d check his catheter, wipe his brow, hold his hand, speaking so quietly Walter could not hear what she said.

In the evening Robert joined them. He brought tacos rolled up in waxed paper or fried chicken in a bucket, or ham sandwiches from the cafeteria. They made a point to talk about anything, the elevator control panel, the doctor with the knee brace, the nurse who always grilled Walter about visiting privileges, the errant balloon floating down the hall. It was a relief to have words in the air. Walter had the idea that what was left in Daniel was the small hard core of his self, but the accumulated stuff of personality and learning and life was seeping away, bit by bit, hour after hour. How odd in the face of that, and also how good it was, to talk about the weather. Daniel’s essential sweetness was intact, and sometimes when he opened his eyes he smiled weakly up at Joyce and as if he’d come a great number of miles and just arrived, he’d say in a thick, phlegmy voice, “Hi, Mom.”

After supper Robert turned on the TV and watched the news, and Joyce moved her chair so that she could see the anchormen’s familiar faces and hear their dispassionate voices. It seemed sacrilegious to Walter that his parents watched complete strangers talk about misfortunes in the city when Daniel was slipping away from them. He went to his brother when Bill Curtis came on, as if the six o’clock news were the McCloud boys’ one occasion to unite against their parents, stand firm against authority. He found that he could remember playing with Dan, that in fact he could retrieve whole scenes, in the bath, in the wading pool, the sandbox, the attic on a rainy afternoon. It took concentration and will and a bit of invention to bring the episodes back. Walter had broken Daniel’s train engine the Christmas he was five and there hadn’t been hell to pay, not at 646 Maplewood Avenue, but Daniel had put his face in his new flannel pajamas and cried softly, in a way that presaged his adolescent stoicism. Walter would have liked to whisper to Daniel, to remind him of their joint past, but he felt shy in his parents’ presence, and he wondered for whose benefit the unburdening really was, if it was actually for himself. He was so sorry about every little thing. It seemed possible that Daniel had some kind of knowledge and authority and
that if Walter could confess to him there might in return be absolution. He couldn’t tell. He didn’t know anything.

Once, when Robert left to go to the cafeteria for coffee, Walter went to his mother, kneeled down awkwardly and put his head in her lap. Daniel’s breathing was labored and Walter didn’t think he could listen anymore. He blocked his ears. But she thought he was about to weep, and she leaned over him and patted him as if he were a baby, trilling, “It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right.” When he lifted his head she said in the same parrot voice, “You shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be here.” There had been a few arguments with various nurses but Joyce had stood her ground, and she had lied too, telling the administration that Walter was already sixteen. It was clear to him that she had lost her judgment, that it was the same to her if a person wept in her lap or blocked his ears in her lap or watched television or knit a suit of armor that no one would ever wear.

He got up and went to the window. There were no natural phenomena outside for inspiration or fortitude. The moon wasn’t rising over the lake and there were no stars in the cloudy sky. The city was below them, all light and movement, and overhead he could hear the burr of a helicopter. The nurse came in and fiddled with the IV pole. He didn’t want his mother to tell him to leave, not at this late date. There was no place to go, nothing he was interested in anymore. He and she were the same, set loose from their moorings. To divert her he said, “I’m going to quit ballet, Mom. I’ve had enough. I need to hang it up for good.”

She nodded, as if she could have told him years ago that he wasn’t suited for the dance, as if she’d known long before that they would someday have this conversation. “You’re sure you want to?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Maybe you should wait until—well, for a couple of months to decide. Or until you find something to replace it.”

“No,” he said. “It’s time to stop. I’m ready.”

Aunt Jeannie bawled Joyce out over the telephone for including Walter in Daniel’s death vigil. She reminded her sister that she never interfered
with her affairs, but that in this case she had to speak her mind. Her own daughter Francie was a year older than Walter, and she would never let Francie witness such a thing. She was worried, she said, about permanent damage to little Walter’s psyche.

Mrs. Gamble also disapproved and spread the word up and down the alley. Walter had gone to the hospital that first afternoon following his run-in with Mr. Kenton, and he made it plain to his mother that he meant to stay for a few hours. His teacher had beaten him, but Walter could bounce back and tough it out with his parents, make his point, insist, storm, fight, have his way. Daniel was a ghastly sight, worse than he had expected, but he had seen and couldn’t take the image back. “I’m going to be part of this family,” Walter said to his mother, the resolve, the strength of his feeling making his voice tremble. He was going to join the inner circle if it entailed watching every cancer victim in the hospital suffer; if it involved making conversation with Susan in the corridor; if it meant spoon-feeding his mother until she had enough starch to come home and sort the mail and sit herself down to a decent supper. He was going to face Daniel and find out what took place at the heartless end. He wasn’t so afraid that he couldn’t look, wasn’t so terrified he couldn’t try to help.

There had been no fond reunion that afternoon, no apologies or reminiscences, brother to brother. Walter followed Joyce’s lead: he held Daniel’s hand while he slept, and when he woke he adjusted the pillow and went to the hall sink for fresh water. Daniel opened his eyes halfway and said hello. That was all. Hello. And Walter said hello back and, without realizing, brought his own hand up and brushed the damp hair to the side, off Dan’s forehead.