The Short History of a Prince (9 page)

He had been absent for most of her childhood, it was true. He had gone far away to college because at eighteen he knew he was in danger of never leaving home, of making his baby sister the center of his existence. It had been a wrenching departure, and even now he couldn’t recall the leave-taking without feeling sorry. He regretted the distance and the fact that they had very few overlapping stories. It was funny, though, the way she seemed to think that he’d never had a Thanksgiving at Lake Margaret, that his life before her birth was unlived. After college at Columbia he’d stayed in New York. He hadn’t the vacation or the money to come home, he told his mother. He hadn’t the inclination, he told his friends. With a few years between them there was something about his parents and little Lucy that made him uneasy. It was as if his family had died and an all-new McCloud unit had moved into 646 Maplewood Avenue. He didn’t know them anymore. He’d had trouble thinking and talking in what felt like the sedated calm of that household.

Without them he managed to have some glorious times in his twenties, in the city. He had partaken of the pleasures consigned to youth, to excessive sex and drink and drugs. He didn’t get drunk much anymore and he rarely smoked dope or did cocaine, and as for sex he occasionally went looking for that someone, that high-wide-and-handsome moment. But Lucy, he was sure, had not ever given herself up to either sin or joy, had never conceived of real experience. It was a waste for a person as beautiful and capable as she was, never to have run like a gazelle across the sand on a beach and talked at high speeds about the intricacies of nothing at all, and woken later in the arms of some improbable boy.

Walter and his group had grown up, gotten tenure, or at least regular jobs, developed paunches. A few had bought homes and toupees and plastic Christmas trees. Some were dead. Some had come
through, made it so far, nursing sick friends and lovers. The playwrights of his generation insisted that they were hanging on with emboldened hearts. Walter doubted that his heart was emboldened by either the deaths of his friends or their political struggles to fight the disease. Still, his young wild life, his secret, lived on in him. For all the ridiculous and petty intrigues of that spent time, he thought of the secret as a force of its own, a current, strong and clear, that ran through him, informing his older, wiser, stodgy self.

Lucy had no such thing, and now and then Walter wanted to wake her, a simple slap, one, two, three, back and forth, hello, wake up, here you are, twenty-one years of age, on this remarkable and sensitive planet, a place where single cells suffer shock if the pressure changes. Suffer shock, he wanted to demand. An old dear, indeed! He remembered that neither his parents nor Daniel had ever suggested that Walter be other than he was, and yet he wanted to grip Lucy’s shoulder and insist that she be different. He noticed, as he reached for another Kleenex, that the car tissue box said, in red cross-stitch, “Happy is the house that shelters a friend.”

Emerson, on Lucy’s tissue box.

“Who wrote this saying?” Walter asked, testing her.

“Marc’s mom gave that to me,” she said. “I don’t think anyone wrote it. Those phrases, ones that are true, get passed on and on.” She nodded, as if to agree with herself. Looking over her shoulder, she parallel-parked the van in one dream-come-true Driver’s Education continuous maneuver.

On the blue linoleum strip in the basement of the Schaumburg park district building, Linda and twenty little girls in spandex and tulle finery made a line. They scratched their legs and talked to one another, some of them making the age-old feminine gesture, slapping their hands to their mouths as they giggled over their three-year-old fancies. Melissa, their teacher, born and bred in Schaumburg, was sixteen. A schaumie, Walter thought. He wasn’t sure if her hair was supposed to look teased and in place, a great puff of it in a second tier of bangs, or if she’d had a nightmare just before she’d rolled out of bed. There was
no telling. She was wearing a black leotard that didn’t quite cover the last tuck of her bottom, but the shortage kept her busy, yanking at the material every few minutes. Once her charges were in line she stood in front of them demonstrating the steps. She did not turn around to see if they were bending their legs correctly, or safely, if they were keeping their backs straight, their feet pointed. There was no barre for them to hold. She motioned to her boyfriend in the corner, her extended index finger jabbing the air, the sign that he should hit the button on the tape deck. There were several girls who didn’t have any interest in following Melissa, and they wrung their friends’ hands and spun until they fell down.

Walter sat on the folding chair on the side, next to Lucy. He tried not to look as if he were watching his homeland go up in flames. In spite of his need to educate, he would keep his outrage at bay and refrain from pontification. He would not keel over into his own lap. He’d sit erect and behave himself. This type of suppression was like holding his breath for a long period, and he intended to see the effort as an exercise, something that would at least firm his stomach muscles and possibly develop his character. When the girls on the dance floor started to turn around and around to the song “I Can Show You the World,” tottering on half-pointe, their arms overhead in the shape of diamonds, rather than the elongated classical ovals, Walter clenched his teeth and gripped the chair. It was going to take all of his strength to prevent himself from scooping up Linda, chasing away, kidnapping her from her life of plenty and horror.

“Lucy,” he nonetheless found himself saying out of his closed mouth. “Lucy.” Classical ballet was the last fruit of Renaissance art. It began in the fourteenth century and came through Russian imperialism into the twentieth century. Imagine if the masters, if Petipa or Fokine had been able to anticipate Linda and all her cohorts and Melissa crucifying the form. “If I had seen this in the future, when I was thirteen,” he muttered, “I would have slit my wrists.”

She had no idea that he was really overwrought. “Sourpuss,” she murmured lovingly.

Walter again turned to gaze at her. She had their mother’s slender nose and hazel eyes. Her light brown hair was pulled back in a pony-tail, her application of pink lipstick still holding. She was lovely, small-boned,
a lightweight girl Marc picked up and spun around. She was happy with her job in customer service at the bank, happy watching her daughter doing what was expected of her, along with her Schaumburg neighbors. Linda, too, might grow up to have run-of-the-mill desires, reasonable expectations. He had watched her only a week before at Lake Margaret, asleep in a bed that used to be his. He had admired the sweaty sheen of her sleeping face. He’d kneeled at her side to look at the line of her eye, the white mother-of-pearl, showing under her slightly open lid. For an instant he believed he might, through that small thin line of white, see into her dreams. It was possible that like her mother she would aspire to a job, central air, a deck out back. There were moments when Walter felt wonder at the feat of his own sister’s normalcy. It was so far beyond his notion of average. She and her husband were average to a marvelous exponential power. Lucy and Marc were like a skating pair, all made up, with matching satin outfits, sequined bodices, hair sprayed, in place, always in place, zigging and zagging over the ice, doing their synchronized moves, glowing, smiling, arms up, waving.

Lucy leaned over and patted him on the shoulder. “Maybe it’s just not all that it’s cracked up to be, Walt, to feel tortured so much of the time.”

He had taken her to see
Swan Lake
, starring Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov at the Civic Opera House in Chicago, when she was eight years old. He would have liked to shout at her, to remind her of it, over the noise of “I Can Show You the World.” “I don’t feel tortured all the time,” he said. “I’m one of the happier people I know, except for, maybe, Kathie Lee. I’m not as happy as Kathie Lee, but almost, Lucy, almost.”

She laughed and slapped her hip. “Wait! Just wait until I tell Marc that one.”

Walter began to say that it wouldn’t hurt her to experience a bad day, that a brief depression would do her good. He bit his tongue. At thirty-five she would probably succumb, and he feared that she would have nothing, no good words, no music except Kenny Loggins’s lullaby CD, for guidance. He looked out to the dance floor, to Linda, already cursed by her dull name. She was standing, frowning, while all the other girls tried to follow Melissa’s combination. She looked
small and bewildered. He wanted to go to her and whisper into her ear, offer her a pink-and-white swirling sucker, a new bike, a dollhouse, anything, so that she’d know it was all right, that life wasn’t always like this moment, standing in the middle of the dance floor, standing, while everyone else breezed past. But it happens sometimes, he’d say, and believe it or not a person learns to make use of the loneliness.

Walter turned to his sister and whispered, “Linda is very, very cute. She’ll be a great little dancer.”

When they got back to the house Lucy’s husband, Marc, was on the deck, firing up the gas grill. “Hello there,” he shouted into the kitchen to Walter. “How’s it going?”

Walter came through the sliding doors, grinning at Marc, grinning as hard as he could. “Good, good,” he said. “Yourself?”

“Great, just great.” He pointed past Walter, back into the house. “How’s Miss Dance on Her Tippy Toes?”

“She did everything right,” Lucy said from the dark kitchen. “Walt even said so.”

At first, during Lucy’s courtship, Walter hadn’t wanted to like Marc. But as her high school career wore on he found that it took too much energy to repress what he supposed could be called fondness. He admired Marc, especially at a distance, when he was out in the yard mowing the grass or washing his newest car in the driveway. Marc worked eighty hours a week at the Chrysler dealership. He was skilled, giving his customers high fives, remembering their first names, and their children’s names, but Walter sensed that his brother-in-law was embarrassed by his calling, that even at nineteen, when he’d started in the business, he’d felt apologetic. He worked out and he had his blond hair styled and he let Lucy dress him in pink short-sleeved polo shirts. His were the honest good looks you’d think you could trust, a man who would not lose his boyish appeal into his forties, who would grow up to be the salesman of the year, time and time again, until at last he owned the dealership.

It was the pleasantness in Marc, always moderated to the same pitch, that rendered Walter speechless. He wondered if Marc was capable
of fighting for a school-bond issue, or seriously thinking about a presidential candidate, or feeling a wave of sadness at the sight of poor lost Linda on the dance floor. Walter once dreamed that Marc was dressed in gold lamé, flying on his own power in a powdery sky. When Walter concentrated on liking Marc, on getting to know him, he was bored to tears, and if he focused on the elements of his dream, what might have been an indicator, a peek into Marc’s soul, what was lurking and probably forever stunted, Walter fell silent.

“She buys this meat from the Jewel,” Marc was saying, “that doesn’t have any fat in it. Zip-o fat.”

“Wow,” Walter said, marveling not at the meat but at a twenty-four-year-old who had already reduced his wife to a pronoun.

Lucy opened the sliding door and stuck her head into the September heat. “Walt, Linda wants to show you what she made at her art class.”

Walter excused himself and followed Linda into the living room. Lucy had just bought a white velvet sofa and loveseat, new end tables, and two ceramic lamps with frilly shades. The living room was not large, but there was a vaulted ceiling with rough-hewn beams that was supposed to make the place feel spacious. Next to the rocking chair, the one relic from Maplewood Avenue, there was an antique wooden wagon with blocks arranged inside to spell Linda, Lucy and Marc. Linda stood at the shelf where Lucy stored the ChildCraft set of reference books, and the
Parents
magazines in binders. Perhaps she had so many classes she couldn’t decide what handicraft to show him, or maybe, Walter thought, she too was struck by the decor of the room.