Ballerina

by Edward Stewart

  Madame Lvovna intercepted Steph at the water cooler. Her face was rigid and disapproving, as though she had caught Steph cheating on a turn.

  ‘You are no longer girl, Stephanie. I am not one hundred per cent certain, but I think you are dancer.’

  ‘Thank you, Madame.’

  ‘I know you are friends with Christine. But you cannot give someone else courage. You can only lose your own trying. Be selfish, Stephanie. A dancer needs all her courage. God gave you yours for you, not for anyone else.’

  The audience came streaming and chatting up the aisle. Anna pried her way to the stage entrance, bucking the tide. She whooshed past the guard, waded into a flock of little girls still in their Circus Polka costumes, pushed open a door.

  Wrong shower. Boys.

  The next door opened into giggles and sweat, girls sprawled in chairs unlacing slippers and peeling off tights. Anna’s eye travelled down the row of dressing tables. There was Steph, cold-creaming her face.

  ‘Hurry up and take your shower, honey. There’s someone I want you to meet.’

  ‘Does it have to be now? I’m pooped.’

  Anna made a mental note: calf’s liver for supper, twice a week. She held out the box of Kleenex. ‘It’ll take five minutes.’

  Steph sighed. ‘Who?’

  ‘Only the director of Empire State Ballet, that’s who.’

  The girl at the next mirror stopped brushing her hair and stared.

  Steph’s face coloured. ‘I promised Chris I’d—’

  ‘Honey this is important.’

  ‘Mom, her parents didn’t even show up. She’s heartbroken.’

  ‘So? It’s your fault the Averys are dizzy socialites? You can leave her a note.’

  Lester Croyden was waiting by the fountain in Lincoln Plaza, a short plump man leaning on an ebony cane. One hand fidgeted with a pocket watch as though it were a yoyo on a gold chain.

  Anna yoo-hooed, made introductions. Lester Croyden steered them across Broadway toward a table at the back of Fiorello’s.

  ‘What will you two ladies have to drink?’

  ‘Ginger ale for both us will be terrific,’ Anna said.

  Lester Croyden shuddered. ‘You have stronger nerves than I do, dearie.’ He ordered two ginger ales and a double Tanqueray martini with a twist straight up.

  Anna’s eyes adjusted to the dimness. Three tables away she saw Heidi Mayerhoff, who did publicity for Volmar and dyed her hair red and was the biggest gossip in the business. Anna shifted on the bench so Heidi could get a good view of Steph and Lester. She wished Steph would try to look a little perkier.

  ‘It’s a shame Cynthia couldn’t have seen your performance,’ Lester was saying to Steph. ‘She was supposed to come with me tonight.’

  Cynthia Gregory? Anna wondered. Who did he think he was kidding?

  ‘But I’m meeting her for dinner and I’m going to tell her all about you.’ Lester Croyden drained his drink like ice water and called for another. ‘You gave a wonderful performance, dearie. Star calibre.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Steph said softly.

  ‘1 haven’t enjoyed a performance so much since Nora’s first Pillar in ’42.’

  Anna couldn’t even smile, it was so pathetic. Nora Kaye, Pillar of Fire? How could he even compare it to a student production of Don Q.? Then he got on to Hugh Laing and Maria Tallchief as if he’d given them their first chance. And Youskevitch, who’d never danced for him. And Robbins! Anna was speechless. Jerry had already choreographed Cage when Lester got his big break booking pickup bands for Hurok. If his dad hadn’t left him twenty million from that chain of clothing stores he’d still be booking schlock.

  ‘I’ll be talking with Erik,’ Lester Croyden was saying. ‘He’s anchoring that series on modern dance for educational television? They’re looking for a young, unknown dancer to—’

  Erik Bruhn, Anna supposed. And then he mentioned Rudy, and Anna had a hunch he didn’t mean the red-nosed reindeer; and then Eddy and Patricia. All right, she wanted to scream, so Villella and McBride say hello to you in the hallway, so what?

  Steph sat twisting the stem of her maraschino cherry.

  Lester Croyden ordered another round and inched his way to the point. ‘The long and short of it is, Empire has room for you, dearie.’

  Anna was proud of Steph. No yelp, no reaction. Just a nod.

  ‘There are two superb coryphées we’ll give you in Swan Lake and Fille and there’s no question you’ll be dancing solos within the year. Bluebird or a Prayer in Coppélia or a younger sister in Pillar. So you can see, you’d have plenty to do. You don’t have to answer right away but I do hope you’ll consider the offer.’

  ‘What about Christine Avery?’ Steph said.

  Anna winced.

  ‘Who?’ Lester Croyden said. ‘Christine who?’

  ‘She danced the Snow pas de deux,’ Steph said.

  Lester Croyden frowned. ‘The girl who couldn’t hold her arabesque?’

  ‘Anyone can stumble,’ Steph said. ‘I almost slipped too.’

  ‘I didn’t notice,’ Lester Croyden said. ‘Sorry, dearie.’

  He wanted Steph badly. Anna could smell it. The teachers must have put out the word on the grapevine. Watch Stephanie Lang—she’s going places. Lester Croyden’s eyes were tiny and black as two raisins in a lump of raw dough and they watered as he looked at the girl. He ran the third-best ballet company in the United States. He pulled down federal grants of a million, two million a year. If he wanted a dancer, then every company from fourth best down would be after her too.

  Anna exhaled. She’d been holding that breath for the last ten years.

  ‘Steph and Chris are best friends,’ Anna said. ‘They’d like to go to the same company.’

  ‘I understand, dearie, and when Stephanie’s friend is ready, we’ll be glad to take another look at her.’ Lester Croyden jiggled the ice in his glass. Anna could tell he wanted to order another. After Marty, she had no trouble spotting a lush. ‘Maybe next year.’

  Anna arched her eyebrows, shot Steph a look that said, I tried. She raised a hand to her mouth, forced a yawn, and patted it back. ‘Gee, that programme must have run an hour overtime. Steph’s too tired to make any decision tonight.’

  ‘Naturally you’ll want time to consider other offers,’ Lester Croyden said.

  Anna couldn’t tell if he’d heard something she hadn’t or if he was just fishing. He was watching her closely now.

  ‘NBT is scouting six girls for the corps,’ he said.

  Anna’s heart gave a kick in her rib cage but she managed a noncommittal grimace as though she’d heard it all before. ‘Volmar keeps those girls in the corps till they’re grandmothers.’ She plunked her purse onto the table. ‘C’m’on, Steph. Bottoms up.’

  ‘I can promise you—Empire wouldn’t make that mistake with Stephanie.’ Lester Croyden pulled a business card from his billfold. He carefully wrote a number across the back. ‘One little favour: this is my home phone. Give me twenty-four hours to match Stephanie’s best offer.’

  Anna took the card. ‘Sure, Lester. We’ll keep in touch.’

  As she slipped out onto Sixty-sixth Street, wincing away from the sting of sunlight and traffic, a voice called out to her.

  ‘Chris—Christine!’

  She turned, squinting. The sun was in her eyes.

  ‘Have I changed that much? Don’t you recognize me?’

  She did not want to be rude but at the same time she did not want to stand by the stage entrance with pitying smug eyes gliding past.

  ‘Good lord, Chris—it’s Ray, Ray Lockwood from Evanston—remember?’

  When he said it, of course she remembered. It had been two years ago, and he seemed a little taller and more broad-shouldered now, but he still had the same alert grey eyes in a sensitive face.

  She shook hands with this stranger from the past and they stood on the sidewalk, talking and trading news of old friends.

  Ray Lockwood said he’d seen a
n announcement in the paper; he’d remembered his mother’s saying Chris was studying at the school. ‘So I cut afternoon classes, and here I am. My God, Chris—I don’t know anything about ballet, but you were terrific.’

  ‘You—saw?’

  She felt a bell clap of terror as his glance met hers. But there was no smugness, no pity in it—just a healthy, cheerful ignorance.

  ‘Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Look, you must be worn out. Can I take you some place quiet for a drink, or a cup of coffee? I mean, if you have a moment?’

  She didn’t feel up to play-acting or asking about people she didn’t remember and had never cared about. She didn’t feel up to pretending her life wasn’t a wreck. ‘I’m sorry, Ray—I don’t.’

  ‘Okay. Some other day. Now that we’re fellow New Yorkers, we’re bound to bump into one another.’ There was a flicker of blue-webbed pulse just above her collarbone, and he thought, How delicate she is.

  ‘You’re living here?’ she said.

  ‘Have been for almost two years. I’m up at Columbia Law.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were interested in law.’

  ‘I wasn’t when we last met. Two years ago I didn’t know what the hell interested me. And I don’t remember you as much of a dancer.’

  ‘I’ve always been a dancer,’ she said.

  ‘Not with me you weren’t.’

  She remembered now. ‘It was my sister’s coming-out and you were wearing a madras jacket and a little bow tie that matched .. . .’ And you were drunk and you terrified me, but she didn’t say that.

  ‘And I kept asking you for the next dance and you kept saying yes and then disappearing. I got the idea either you were scared of dancing or you were scared of me. And since there’s nothing scary about me, obviously it had to be dancing.’

  ‘But that’s not dancing—that’s not even music!’

  The simple vehemence of her reaction startled him. And instructed him. It was as though she had thrown open a window and let him glimpse the mechanism of her thinking. He was a practical young man, and he did not have time or talent for art. But it hinted to him of the magical and the miraculous, of all sorts of music and dance and poetry his own life lacked, and he would have liked to be at ease with artists. He would have liked to be at ease with this frail young girl.

  ‘Anyway,’ he smiled, ‘I looked for you all night. I even wrote you letters. I don’t suppose any ever got forwarded?’

  ‘I sort of remember a postcard from Europe.’

  ‘From me a postcard’s a letter.’

  She felt awkward. She wondered why Ray Lockwood wanted to talk to her. She had never been comfortable with lawyers and businessmen. They seemed a foreign race who owned large cars and large houses and played golf at country clubs and drank cocktails at noon and only went to the ballet to fall asleep. She had never spoken their language and yet she sensed Ray Lockwood, in a stumbling way, trying to speak hers.

  I’ve got to make a good impression, she thought, and I’ll say good-bye as quickly as possible.

  She’d forgotten how you made a good impression on people like Ray Lockwood: there was a pattern to it, like ballroom dancing. She’d forgotten how you say good-bye to them. There was a pattern to that too. She began edging back toward the crowd, taking up a good-bye distance, but he edged right alongside her, not about to let her slip away.

  ‘I hope you won’t think I’m still trying to pressure you into that waltz—but I’d like to see you, Chris. For dinner or a movie. Or maybe dinner and a movie. If dancers like dinner and movies.’

  She didn’t answer. If he hadn’t been a link to her family, if she hadn’t disgraced herself, she would have said yes.

  ‘Can I phone you?’ he said.

  She hesitated. ‘You can phone the place where I’m staying.’

  She gave the number and he wrote his down for her.

  ‘Thank you, Ray. Thank you for coming today. That was kind of you.’

  ‘It wasn’t kind at all. You were beautiful—really beautiful.’

  He sensed an odd vulnerability in her and it made him hesitate, debating whether an old, not very good friend had the right to kiss her. By the time he had made up his mind to risk it she had slipped into the crowd and was waving good-bye. He waved, disappointed, and then thought, At least I’ve got her phone.

  But he hadn’t.

  The woman who answered didn’t speak English, and he wondered if Chris had given him the wrong number on purpose.

  six

  Marius Volmar hurried across Lincoln Center Plaza back to his office. The memory of the girl stayed with him like the afterimage of a blinding flash. He saw her pale face with its firm white curves and loose blonde hair. The eyes were huge and green. There was a hint of smile in the narrowly parted lips.

  His throat pounded. His heart felt tight. He did not want to lose the image. His mind played over the extended neck, the soft shoulders, the long lovely arms, the singing movement, the pliancy and balance and serenity, the unbroken flow of line from fingertip to toe, the body so perfectly mastered that it could perfectly serve the music.

  Well, perhaps not quite perfectly: her footwork was slow. But all girls were slow till they came to Volmar. He would tap the speed in her.

  He locked the office door behind him. From the safe he took the sketches of The Sleeping Beauty. They were almost forty years old and he had to be careful of the paper turned brittle. He spread them across the already littered desk. He had looked at them only five times in all these years. But without hesitation he took up his pen, began notating, amending where he had left off.

  The past came back effortlessly across the forty year abyss. Faster than his hand could move the dance rushed past his eyes, the music past his ears. An explosion of memory filled him like hot wind gusting through a tunnel.

  He was twenty years old again, already a principal with the Royal Danish Ballet, the youngest choreographer ever to have six works in the international repertory. He was mounting a Sleeping Beauty that season: coaxing long-lost material out of Copenhagen’s tsarist refugees, he had restored most of the original Petipa choreography and Tchaikovsky core. The ballet starred his first teacher—his mother. At thirty-eight, she was at the height of her powers. But the year was 1940 and the Nazis ran Denmark.

  The Nazis had laws, Nuremberg laws, and his mother had had a Jewish grandfather. She was famous, she had enemies within the ballet, she could be made an example. Opening night the occupation police came to the theatre, told her to put on a coat over her tights, and took her away.

  The ballet was never danced. Marius Volmar never saw his mother again.

  Nuremberg laws did not care about Jewish great-grandfathers. Volmar was allowed to live and to work. But there was a bitterness in him, a freezing contempt for humans and their laws and their nationalisms and socialisms.

  He never choreographed again.

  He directed, he mounted, he improved other men’s work. He staged productions in London and Paris, Buenos Aires and New York. He made American ballet and he made New York a capital of world ballet.

  But the dance that was in him, the dance that was his, stayed frozen up.

  Until now.

  When he laid down his pen to take a breath, his shirt was drenched in sweat. His watch told him he had been at his desk three feverish hours.

  He knew creativity. It had its seasons and they were different from the earth’s. For half a man’s life the soul could be blanketed in ice till spring came with its slow gentle thaw. Or there could be a rush of summer, unexpected as an ambush, when the spirit burst violently into bloom—and just as quickly died.

  He knew what was happening to him. This was summer, short and savage, and it gave him very little time.

  According to the recital programme, the girl’s name was Stephanie Lang. Her teacher was Vera Alexeyevna Lvovna.

  Marius Volmar reached a hand for the telephone.

  ‘Who is she?’ he asked. They were speaking Russian.<
br />
  ‘She is a girl,’ Lvovna said tartly. ‘A girl who wants to dance.’

  The narrowness of the room, made narrower by bookcases, the tiny space of shawled tables and hideaway bed, heightened Volmar’s awareness of her mood. It was not co-operative. ‘You must know more about her than that.’

  ‘What is there to know about her? She is learning. So long as she learns, she is in my class. When she stops learning....’

  Madame Lvovna shrugged. She admitted to seventy years, which meant she was eighty, but it was an energetic shrug. Her eyes, always made up, always expressive, travelled the wall. Everything that was not a book or an autographed ballet shoe was a photograph signed with love or esteem or respect. Some who had signed were great. All had been her pupils. Her eyes seemed to say, That is what happens when they stop learning: they become photographs.

  ‘She has great promise,’ Volmar prodded.

  ‘Acorns have promise.’

  ‘She knows a good deal more than she shows.’

  ‘So do acorns.’

  Ballerinas would do better not to get old, Volmar reflected. But then, he thought, so would human beings.

  ‘You’ve taught her well,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve taught her nothing. What she took from me I took from Galinova, who took it from Krasnova, who took it from Petipa .... Dance is a language. No one teaches a language. Except to foreigners, and then it’s always too late. All we can do is speak the language distinctly for our children and let them imitate.... Later they’ll invent.... They’ll change things.... Look how they’ve changed the Russian, dropped three letters from the alphabet.’

  She sank more deeply into the cushions with which she had stuffed her chair. She sighed heavily, as though the Bolsheviks had eliminated the three most beautiful letters in the language.

  ‘There are girls in my class who can do combinations for which there are not even names. Pavlova could not do an entrechat huit. My girls are required to. Is that progress? No. It’s just change.’

  Volmar sensed Madame drifting from the subject he had come to discuss. ‘This Lang girl seems advanced for her age.’

  ‘Advanced? Bournonville created La Vestale for Lucile Grahn when she was fourteen years old. That was her debut. One hundred forty years ago. Do you know a fourteen-year-old today who could dance La Vestale.’