Ballerina

by Edward Stewart

  The frame of the mirror bloomed with telegrams; the flowers that had been arriving all afternoon overflowed the chairs and carpeted the corners of the dressing room. A knock came on the door, just loud enough to break into Steph’s concentration. She blinked in annoyance.

  ‘Lily, would you see who that is?’

  As Steph leaned back toward her reflection Mrs Avery appeared in the mirror. Steph’s hand stopped in mid-stroke.

  ‘I’m very busy, Mrs Avery.’

  Mrs Avery’s face was haggard, the eyes blank and used up. ‘Would you see Christine for a moment?’

  Steph drew a breath. ‘No. I have to finish dressing and then I have to warm up.’ She squinted her eye shut, pencilled the brown line above the lid. When she opened the eye again Mrs Avery had not moved.

  There was an odd expression on the woman’s face, a trembling effort at control. It touched Steph strangely and she tried to keep her voice gentle.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I need time to get ready.’

  ‘Please—just give her a moment?’

  Steph tried to control the anger that was pushing against her stomach. ‘Mrs Avery, I don’t want to see your daughter. Not before performance, not after performance, not ever again.’

  Mrs Avery inhaled and then she spoke softly. ‘You won’t see her ever again. But she’d like to say good-bye.’

  ‘We’ve said good-bye.’

  ‘She’s sick.’

  ‘I know that and I’m sorry and after five years I’ve learned that there’s nothing I can do about it.’

  ‘She’s sicker than any of us realized.’

  ‘Mrs Avery, I’ve given Chris all the sympathy she’s ever going to get from me.’

  ‘She’s going home. I’m taking her tonight.’

  ‘Good. She can’t take care of herself—maybe someone else can.’

  ‘She’s going home to die.’

  The words had a delayed impact. It took them two heartbeats to penetrate Steph’s brain and then they exploded. In the shock of understanding she froze. Her mouth fumbled to push out words.

  ‘Die?’

  Mrs Avery nodded.

  ‘Does Chris—know?’

  Mrs Avery did not answer. Her eyes were closed an instant and then they opened to stare at Steph with bleak dignity. Her hand reached back toward the door and as it swung inward Steph took a deep gulp of air.

  Chris stood in the doorway. Her head was lowered and her hands hung like limp flowers at her sides. A cold shaft of light slanted upon her face and a gentle bewilderment seemed to reach out from her and touch the whole world.

  Steph’s mouth moved and no sound came out.

  The dresser edged toward the door and with a whimpering noise she vanished. Mrs Avery followed and closed the door.

  Chris’s pale, soft gaze met Steph’s. They stared helplessly at one another.

  And then Steph cried, ‘Chris, oh, my God!’ and rushed to embrace her friend.

  Steph’s dresser whispered to a wardrobe mistress who was hurrying to an emergency in the girls’ dressing room. The wardrobe mistress, stitching a rip in a noblewoman’s gown, repeated the whisper.

  It rippled past a girl checking her hair spray and brushed a girl who was testing the ribbons on her toe shoes. She whispered to two girls who were helping one another with the zippers on their costumes, and one of them carried the whisper out into the wings to a boy from the corps who was warming up on a carpenter’s ladder.

  A principal wandering by caught the whisper and spread it to another principal and it eddied through the stagehands and lighting men and out through the company till it was as much part of the opening night confusion as the sparking generators and the dust and the flashing lights and moving sets and the sound of an oboe in the pit playing the Lilac Fairy’s theme.

  ‘Why did we argue?’ Chris said.

  ‘I don’t remember.’ Tears came to Steph’s eyes but so gently and gradually that there was no spill, only a wobbling around the edges of the dressing room.

  ‘It was my fault,’ Chris said.

  ‘No,’ Steph said, ‘it was mine.’ A slender stream of sorrow twisted back and forth in the grey of her mind and where it touched a memory there were flashes of movement and colour. She saw Chris flushed and glazed, taking curtain calls after Do I and Cantabile. She saw Chris weeping with failure after her school recital and she saw the pale blonde child with one hand on the bathroom sink, warming up for scholarship auditions. She remembered all the hopes and terrors they had shared and the years that had passed like a single yesterday.

  ‘We’ve let too much get in the way,’ she said. ‘We’ve forgotten what matters.’

  ‘I never found out what matters,’ Chris said. She radiated the helplessness and the beauty of a puppy or a baby, of something newborn and trusting.

  She laid her head on Steph’s shoulder. Her fingers tightened around Steph’s hand.

  There was an ache in Steph and fear that came in long waves. But there was something else too. She found herself remembering childhood and Christmas and a time when dance had been not an aching turn-out but a snow-white dream. She found herself remembering that evening when she’d argued with Ray Lockwood.

  He’d said there were ballerinas who’d given up performances to let their understudies go on. She remembered saying, ‘Maybe in books or in movies, but not in ballet.’

  But now she was thinking: Why not?

  She saw that this did not need to be the end for Chris.

  I have a life. Chris has—tonight. WHY NOT?

  And in that instant her mind was made up. ‘Stop talking as though it was over. Nothing’s over. Nothing’s even begun.’

  ‘Oh, Steph, don’t try. I know how long I have. Two months, six months....’

  ‘You have more than that. Much more.’

  ‘Don’t. Please. It hurts even to hope. Don’t try to make me.’

  ‘You have tonight, Chris.’

  Chris stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You have as long as the longest memory of anyone sitting in that theatre.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

  ‘Dance, dance instead of me.’

  Chris swayed and put a foot behind her. ‘Me—go out there—tonight?’

  ‘You know the role. Take it. You’ve worked every bit as hard as me.’ She gripped Chris by the shoulders. ‘For once in your life take something for yourself! You’ve spent your life preparing—you’re ready—get out there and dance!’

  Chris stood in wondering denial. ‘But Sleeping Beauty’s your chance.’

  ‘No, Chris.’ Steph slipped out of her costume. She placed it in Chris’s hands. ‘This is. Merde.’

  When Steph came out of the dressing room she was wearing street clothes. ‘Lily,’ she told the dresser, ‘go help her, please. The back has to be taken in and the waist is loose.’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  Steph moved quickly through the clusters of dancers. ‘What’s happened?’ they asked.

  ‘Chris is dancing Aurora.’

  ‘Is it true that she ...?’

  Steph saw the terror in their eyes and she saw that, somehow, they knew. Dancers always knew. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s true.’

  The dancers waited and whispered and watched and ached.

  Just as the curtain was rising on the prologue Chris opened the door. A gust of noise swept past her: stagehands were shouting and the audience was applauding and the music was thundering. The sounds fell against her skin, driving her back like rain. She felt a moment’s chill, and then the shiver passed, leaving her refreshed and strong.

  She walked swiftly to the warm-up barre backstage. The dancers said hello, which wasn’t like them, and they backed off and let her have the barre, which wasn’t like them at all. She noticed they were watching her oddly as she began her pliés.

  She’d missed three days of class, so she warmed up slowly, stretching and bending with great care. There was a trembling instabi
lity to her first balance but she conquered it. Her mind and muscles began assembling her entrance. She raised her arm, cocked her foot, shut out reality and imagined the music. Her body fell into the steps.

  She was finishing her warm-up when Marius Volmar came hurrying backstage. Angrily, he asked the stage manager what was delaying the curtain.

  ‘We’re waiting for Aurora.’

  Volmar turned toward the rehearsal barre and saw Chris. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Getting ready.’

  ‘For what?’

  She finished her combinations and turned to face him. She had a sudden conviction of herself that was new and terrifying in its sureness.

  ‘I’m dancing tonight.’

  Marius Volmar had watched the prologue from the front of the house. He knew nothing of the rumours that had swept backstage.

  ‘Where’s Stephanie?’ he said.

  The air filled with something silent and suffocating, like dust hovering after the explosion of a bomb.

  ‘She walked out,’ the stage manager said.

  Volmar jerked as though he’d been struck. ‘Walked out?’

  ‘She told Lily to dress Chris and then she walked out.’

  Volmar’s eyes fixed the man in fury. ‘Walked out where?’

  ‘We can’t find her.’

  Volmar wheeled on Chris. She could feel the rage welling out of him. ‘Where’s Stephanie?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The stage manager’s thumbs were fidgeting in his fists. ‘Mr Volmar, we can’t hold the curtain any longer. Do you want me to announce the cast change?’

  Volmar gave a negative snap of the head. ‘No. No announcement.’

  The stage manager stood wondering if Volmar was actually going to call off the performance. Volmar weighed the idea, but the memory of the Copenhagen Sleeping Beauty, of his mother vanishing in the police car, swept through his mind. He stared at Chris in black disappointment.

  She was not his Aurora. Was he never to have his dream?

  ‘The orchestra’s waiting, Mr Volmar. We have to tell them something.’

  ‘Tell them to begin the prelude.’ Marius Volmar sighed the heaviest sigh of his life. ‘You’ll dance tonight, Christine. And tomorrow you and Stephanie are both fired.’

  Chris felt ready and serene and, coming down from a pirouette, she smiled at him. I’m alive, she thought. It took me my whole life, but I’m alive.

  A spot clicked on, stage right, and Anna’s hands readied to applaud Aurora’s entrance. There was absolute silence in the theatre and absolute stillness on the stage.

  And one empty spot. Anna’s throat tightened.

  Aurora stepped lightly onstage.

  Anna’s heart dropped like a stone into her stomach. It was Chris up there dancing Aurora—not Steph, Chris!

  The audience applauded. Anna sat frozen in a rush of shock. Dear God, something’s happened to Steph, tonight of all nights!

  She shot to her feet, pushed her way past jutting knees and surprised faces. She ran up the aisle, stumbled, kept going.

  ‘What’s the fastest way backstage from here?’

  The speechless usherette managed to point.

  Anna plunged down the deserted corridor, through the door marked No entrance, up the little flight of stairs. The stage manager tried to block her way.

  ‘What’s happened to my little girl? Where’s Steph? What have you done to her?’

  Anna’s running footsteps caught up with Steph in the passageway beneath the theatre.

  ‘Thank God, I’ve been looking everywhere for you! Where do you think you’re going? Get back on that stage!’

  Steph faced her mother. ‘I’m not dancing tonight.’

  Anna swayed and recovered her balance. ‘Of course you’re dancing. You can still do Act Two.’

  Steph’s eyes were absolutely calm and that scared Anna.

  ‘Why?’ Anna screamed.

  ‘Because.’

  ‘You’re walking out, just like that?’

  ‘Just like that.’

  ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’

  Anna’s voice was a hoarse rushing whisper. ‘Honey, we’ve worked our whole lives for tonight! Tonight’s your big break! They’ve got coast-to-coast TV, every newspaper in the world’s out there! After tonight you’ll be a ballerina! You can dance anywhere, London, LA, Leningrad, you name it! You’ll never have a chance like this again, you walk out now and you’re throwing away your career!’

  Steph kept walking. Anna caught up again.

  ‘Why, will you just tell me why? After all the years I—’

  Steph took her mother’s hands. ‘Mom, I love you. I’m grateful for what you’ve done. I’m sorry for what you’ve suffered. You wanted a dancer for a daughter, you’ve got one. Now let me run my own career and make my own decisions and live my own life.’

  Anna clutched at Steph but the raincoat slipped from her fingers. She stared in blank disbelief. Steph was gone. Her daughter was gone. All the years, the work, the sacrifice—gone.

  Denial swelled in her and with it one last spurt of fight.

  ‘Steph! Wait a minute! I have to talk to you!’

  Too late. She turned the corner, breathless, and there was no sign of Steph.

  In the viewing room at the rear of the theatre, Steph sat alone. She witnessed a dance performance surpassing the beauty of any she had ever seen.

  She had worried about Chris’s pas seul. There was no need. Chris danced it simply, exquisitely.

  Sasha became the ideal self-effacing partner. In a hundred subtle and gallant ways he supported Chris. He covered her slips so quietly, so beautifully, that she appeared to be taking virtuoso risks. He let her shine like an angel of lightness and movement and grace.

  And she became that angel.

  There was perfection that night in Christine Avery, in her figure and face and movement, and in the blaze of that perfection all impurities were burned out. Her leaps seemed to hang in the air. Her turns were lightning fast. Her balances opened like flowers. There were breadth and sweep and poetry in her line. She teased where the music teased, soared where it soared, grew as it grew, from playfulness through suffering to love.

  She was Aurora the young girl, Aurora the woman: it was as though Tchaikovsky himself were singing through her.

  When Sasha led Chris onstage for their pas de deux, she was wearing the white of a bride on her wedding day. And even in the rush of turns on pointe and the dizzying climactic fish dive where Sasha caught her inches from the floor, she was smiling a bride’s smile.

  Then came the boot-stopping moment: the very mystery of dance itself seemed to unlock, and Chris seemed to float free of gravity and time and all that was earthbound.

  It was a moment of sadness for the characters onstage, for all the nobles and the fairies and the Mother Goose figures realized that their beloved princess must soon leave them to go live happily ever after with her prince.

  Those in the audience who were sitting very near the stage could see that some of the dancers were crying.

  After the closing mazurka, when Chris and Sasha stood embraced and the cast knelt in a circle around them, a whisper swept the first rows: The defector was crying! And the King, and the Queen, and Puss in Boots, and....

  But Christine Avery was not crying.

  She was smiling with a radiance that lit the theatre.

  The orchestra thundered out Tchaikovsky’s final chords. There was an explosion of applause. The curtain fell, then rose again.

  Christine Avery came forward to curtsy. As she lowered her head, smiling and swan-graceful and meek, the applause doubled and doubled again.

  Another triumph for National Ballet Theater!

  Another triumph for Marius Volmar!

  Even the dancers applauded.

  There were tossed programmes and bravos and shouted questions: ‘What’s her name—Amory?’

  ‘Someone said Avery.’

  ‘Who is she?’
r />   ‘Whoever she is, she’s certainly a star now.’

  Fighting back tears, Stephanie Lang rose to her feet and joined the standing ovation for her friend Christine Avery.

  Glossary of Foreign and Technical Terms

  (Certain definitions paraphrased by permission from Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets, by George Balanchine and Francis Mason)

  adagio: a dance in slow tempo, performed by a ballerina and her partner.

  à la seconde: in second position. See position.

  allegro: dancing that is lively and fast, in comparison to adagio.

  arabesque: set pose. In its most common form, the dancer stands on one leg with the other leg raised behind and fully extended.

  assemble: a step in which the dancer rises low off the floor, straightens both legs in the air, and returns to fifth position.

  attitude; set pose. The dancer stands on one leg and brings the other leg up behind at an angle of ninety degrees, with the knee bent.

  ballerina: the highest rank of female dancer in a ballet company.

  barre: the round horizontal bar which dancers hold onto for support while exercising.

  barrel turn: a spectacular movement in which the danseur travels in a circle, executing a series of turns in the air, fully extending his arms and legs while aloft.

  battement: any of various movements of the leg executed with a rapid beating motion.

  bourrée: see pas de bourrée.

  cabriole: a movement in which the dancer raises one leg to front, back, or side, then jumps with the supporting leg, bringing it up to beat under the other.

  chainé: a series of rapid turns in a circle or straight line, executed on pointe or demi-pointe.

  chassé: a sliding step. The dancer jumps low off the floor, lands, and the working foot ‘chases’ the landing foot out of position.

  choreologist: a specialist skilled in any of several systems for notating ballet movements.

  cinq: fifth position.

  corps de ballet: the dancers in a ballet company who perform in large groups.

  coryphée: a dancer who performs in a group smaller than the corps de ballet.

  croisé: a position in which the dancer stands obliquely to the house so that when either leg is raised it crosses the other leg.