The Short History of a Prince (3 page)

“Ow! Jesus! Mitch, you dropped me!” It was Susan, on the floor, hugging her arms to her chest, glowering.

Walter opened his eyes. Mitch was stooped, petting Susan’s hand. But he was staring at Walter, shaking, laughing noiselessly. “What?” Mitch finally said. “What the hell were you doing, McCloud?”

Mitch rarely called his friend by his last name, but when he did, the endearment sent a tingle through Walter. “Are you okay, Susan?” Walter said.

“Fine. Just fine.” Very little then, besides her feelings, had been hurt. She stood up, did a demi-plie, a battement tendu, to see if all the parts still worked.

“Honest to God, Walter,” Mitch said, “what was that thing you just—”

“Would you take that stupid coat off,” Susan snapped. “It makes me hot just looking at you.”

Mitch sat on the sofa, clamping his teeth together to keep from tittering. Walter knew he had been a success but he puckered up, wouldn’t revel in it. He got busy removing the suit coat and hanging it in the closet. Susan stood in the middle of the floor untangling the earring
that was caught in her hair. In an effort to bring them back together Walter said, “I’ll never forget the performance Sue Rawson and I saw at Ravinia, the time we had the far-left seats and we could see backstage, and one of the dancers was sick every time she—”

Susan, her earring freed, lifted her hands over her head and rose on her half-pointes, just as the fourth movement, the Elegy section, began. She was wearing white canvas pants with holes in the knees, skinny yellowed sneakers, a lavender tank top. The only light in the room came from the Gambles’ half-finished carport, the beam from the dangling fixture filtering through the leaded hall windows like the refracted light of a star.
Serenade
was sacred to Walter and Mitch and Susan in part because they knew it was sacred to the company members at the New York City Ballet, and in part because they had seen it at a time in their lives when they were especially vulnerable to the beauty of the music and the splendor of the ideas. They believed that the ballet was about the spirit world, about evil, and love, death, the triumph of goodness. Susan, only moments before in the living room, had been shocked by Walter wearing the hideous Liberace jacket, and then appalled by Mitch, throwing her around like a sack of flour, and dropping her! Hurting her! She would show them. She would return the dignity they owed to
Serenade
, to Mr. Balanchine, to Tchaikovsky and to herself.

Walter moved to the sofa and sat down next to Mitch, to watch her. She danced with her eyes shut, as if she had no need to see her audience or the obstacles—the piano, the rolltop desk, the coffee table, the card table with the jigsaw puzzle of the medieval fortress. There was a quality of liquid gold about her movements, Walter thought, perhaps from the strange light on her long hair, her long arms, her long exquisitely turned-out leg unfolding into an arabesque. There was such eloquence in the simple movement. He swallowed and bit his lip hard with his eyeteeth. It wouldn’t do to cry and embarrass himself. He felt, watching her, that he inhabited her body, that given her set of tools, what was such an arbitrary gift after all, he would have danced just as she did. She moved as if there were no distinction between her own limbs and the music, as if her flesh and the sound coming from the phonograph had become, in the McCloud living room, part of the same wave.

Walter soon forgot his bloody lip, forgot the tears spilling down his cheeks. Going to the ballet had always inspired conflicting emotions in him. He wanted, often in quick succession, to be the girl, wanted to be the girl with the boy, wanted to love the boy, wanted to be the boy, wanted again to be the girl. It was a confusion of endless change and pairing. But that night, for the length of the Elegy, he felt as if he were inside Susan’s skin. He was one character, only one, moving her arms as she did, with each inevitable step she took.

When the music came to the end she slid into the hall with her arms flung back. Walter realized that Daniel must have slipped in at some point, that he was sitting on the edge of the wing chair. He’d been watching Susan too. The record scraped around and around. The boys sat in the gloom listening as the needle methodically crossed the scratches. They could not have said what it was she had done to start the charm. She had used basic steps that anyone could learn. She had kicked off her shoes—they might have done the same. She had put steps together and run around, tossing her head to keep her hair from falling across her face. And yet they waited in the quiet, hardly breathing. They felt they couldn’t lift a finger until she did, until she told them to.

She was still out of breath when she drifted back through the wide hall arch. Like an ordinary ballerina she sank to the floor in one motion, and she spread her legs in a V, stretching over her knees, her long limp torso draped along her calves, her hair covering her feet like kelp.

Walter had wanted to reach and do nothing more than clasp Mitch’s hand, maybe even hold it for a time. Daniel coughed and said, “Wow.” Mitch squatted and went to Susan with his legs bent, his knuckles to the floor, like a chimp, Walter thought. The boyfriend lifted her heavy hair off her shoe, and smoothed it down her back. He lay next to her, buzzing into her ear, “Suze. Suze.”

She extended her hand to him with all the poignancy of the dying swan recovering for one last little flap-flap. Walter leaned forward to see them better. It was not wrong, to look upon this scene d’amour, considering his emotion, his—involvement, considering that he could just as easily have been Susan, just as naturally had the right to reach for Mitch’s fingers, to kiss them, and hold them to his own flushed cheek.

The lovers in the fold-out seat woke up when the car came to a complete stop at the end of the drive. The McClouds had arrived at Lake Margaret at eleven, well before the party was to start. The cousins’ dogs barked and ran back and forth in front of the station wagon. Robert would not have felt truly penitent if he’d run over his sister-in-law’s moronic dogs, and he did not slow down much. Susan looked around herself, rubbed her blue eyes, stretched, groaned and slumped back into Mitch.

Walter had not walked the usual final leg of the trip because he was bound on either side with baggage. He opened the door slowly so that none of the goods would fall out, fondly swatted at the dogs, told them, as each of the McClouds always did, and to no avail, to shut up. He smelled the freshly cut grass and the canvas sail from the great-grandfather’s sea boat that was drying on the lawn. In the outside air he was sure he could detect the fragrance of the mold and must of the indoors, the cold soot of the fireplaces and the faintest hint of mothballs. He breathed deeply. The old house was in need of foundation repairs and a coat of paint, but for Jeannie’s party there was enough to show off in the grounds and the enormous screen porch that looked over the lake. She had wanted her sons at least to spruce up the front entrance before the gala, but they had been busy working at the family grocery store. Walter was glad the paint was peeling. The shabbiness, he thought, made the place seem dramatic and dignified; it commanded attention, in the way a gaunt elderly woman would, the spinster who had lived through the wars.

Walter loved to lie on the swing on the porch, secure from mosquitoes and gnats, and read the nineteenth-century novels his oldest aunt, Sue Rawson, prescribed. He loved the kitchen where the aunts and nieces held on with an iron grip to the Lake Margaret etiquette, as well as to their positions, based on relations, many of which went back to their birth orders and the petty squabbles of childhood. There was only one bowl that melon balls could be served in, no sympathy for the sister-in-law who didn’t know better and brought out the orange platter. Aunt Jeannie was obsessive about the refrigerator, and she defrosted it
compulsively, guarding the appliance as if it were a beloved feverish animal, the wet cloths like bandages dripping down the shelves.

Lake Margaret held for Walter some of his finer memories of Sue Rawson. Of course his mother had given him life, and yet Sue Rawson, he sometimes grandly thought, had given him his own self, something that may have been even more difficult than birthing a baby. From the very beginning, it seemed, without either the benefit or the obstruction of love, his tall aunt had looked down her beaky nose at him and seen him clearly. She had planned what amounted to a seduction by taking him to the ballet when he was nine; she had known every little move he would make in his seat, how tears would spring into his eyes at the first sight of the ballerinas in their gauzy blue skirts. For him, she knew, the dancers’ floating hair and arms and legs would seem like the notes made visible, like music itself running around on pattering feet.
I want to do what they are doing
. She knew the very words he’d say to himself.
I want, somehow, to be them
. She was equipped with the schedule for the Kenton School of Ballet when Joyce called a few days later, inquiring about dance lessons for Walter.

At the lake Sue Rawson often invited him up to her room during happy hour to listen to the opera on her phonograph. The rest of the family was down on the porch with the crackers and beverages and talk of boating, but he was in her room, the late-afternoon light flickering gold on the braided rug, the white curtain fluttering in the breeze. Joan Sutherland, Rosa Ponselle, Renata Tebaldi sang of heartbreak in Italian while Sue Rawson sat in her chair following the score. There was something thrilling in the severe commands she used to make him pay attention to particular passages. When he was older, he understood that she’d been trying to show him the way into a life of meaning with the music. As a child, he knew that regular people, his younger aunts, and his uncles, yapped at the children to pick up their towels, their inner tubes and buckets, but it was plain that Sue Rawson didn’t spend her energy for nothing. She was different from other women and not very much like any man Walter knew. Certainly she was leagues apart from his mother, who was small-boned and had soft dark hair that curled at her shoulders. Sue Rawson had thick ankles and large wrists, a gray pageboy haircut, and the pupils in her blue eyes seemed not to expand beyond a prick of black.

Although she was his aunt, his mother’s oldest sister, he never thought of her as Aunt Sue. He never called her anything to her face. At home they always referred to her as Sue Rawson. For a long time he supposed that Rawson was a suffix that any parent could add to a person’s name to give it a regional distinction. As a boy he naturally did not think about her past history. In his twenties he learned that she’d inherited a considerable sum of money from a maiden Greek professor she’d had at Vassar. They had had a deep friendship, according to his mother, whatever that meant exactly, and they’d traveled to Italy and Greece together after Sue Rawson’s graduation.

In Wisconsin she was usually reading on the porch, writing in the margins of her book, and she sailed in the weekend races, fiercely, with a need to finish at the head. For Walter there were long wild summer days at Lake Margaret, swimming with the cousins, swimming until his lungs were heavy with water, his ears plugged, his eyes itchy and red, his nose stuffed. The noon whistle blew from a mysterious source in town, to tell them to go up to the house for lunch. During the quiet time, if the bugs weren’t bothersome, he lay in the hammock on the lawn while the cicadas, in the green of the catalpa and oak trees, pierced the quiet. In the still heat of the afternoon, damp, waterlogged deep inside himself, he tiptoed to the porch to Sue Rawson, to request another book.

At dinner the parents drank and argued about politics, slamming their hands on the table, shouting back and forth about the threat of communism, the danger of the beatnik, the hippie, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Gene McCarthy, the unfettered female, the New Math. Walter knew very little about his own turbulent times, and he thought the adults behaved like imbeciles. If they’d had a particularly rousing meal, they marked the day and the year on one of the wine bottles with an indelible pen and placed it on the ledge on the porch. The shelf ran around the wall just above the screens and was cluttered with bottles, some that went back as far as 1900. The children, jammed together at the table, all skinny arms and elbows, were noisy and crude, farting, putting peas up their noses and, once, slinging mashed potatoes, like snowballs, at one another. It took three throws for an adult to notice the commotion across the room. Uncle Wally, who died shortly after, scooped up a mashed-potato ball from the
serving dish and lobbed it over to his son. It missed his target and hit Sue Rawson squarely on the back as she made her way into the kitchen. Even the youngest child knew not to laugh. Aunt Jeannie leaped up, averting a stunned silence, and in a frenzy began both scolding the perpetrators and with her napkin blotting the buttery smear on Sue Rawson’s red shirt. Walter wondered years later if that single ball of potato did it, if, as Jeannie shrilled into her ear, Sue Rawson said to herself, This, none of this, is funny.