“And you must, after the effort of launching your body is accomplished, let it fall in midair—this way.” She heaved her body with a stupendous inflation off the floor and came to rest limply, like a deflated balloon.
“Oh, but you will be a dancer!” the girl sighed gratefully, “but I do not see why, since you have already a husband.”
“Can’t you understand that I am not trying to get anything—at least, I don’t think I am—but to get rid of some of myself?”
“Then why?”
“To sit this way, expectant of my lesson, and feel that if I had not come the hour that I own would have stood vacant and waiting for me.”
“Is your husband not angry that you are so much away?”
“Yes. He is so angry that I must be away even more to avoid rows about it.”
“He does not like the dance?”
“Nobody does, only dancers and sadists.”
“Incorrigible! Teach me again about the jeté.”
“You cannot do it—you are too fat.”
“Teach me and I shall be able to play it on the piano for your lessons.”
When anything went wrong with the adagio, in silent and controlled rage, Alabama blamed the girl.
“You hear something far away,” said Madame, suggesting.
Alabama could not manage to convey hearing with the lines of her body. She was humiliated to listen with her hips.
“I hear only Stella’s discords,” she whispered fiercely. “She does not keep time.”
Madame withdrew herself when her pupils quarreled.
“A dancer’s supposed to lead the music,” she said succinctly. “There is no melody in ballet.”
One afternoon David came with some old friends.
Alabama was angry with Stella when she saw him there.
“My lessons are not a circus. Why did you let them come in?”
“It was your husband! I cannot stand in front of the door like a dragon.”
“Failli, cabriole, cabriole, failli, soubresaut, failli, coupé, ballonné, ballonné, ballonné, pas de basque, deux tours.”
“Isn’t that ‘Tales from the Vienna Woods’?” asked the tall chic Dickie, smoothing herself over.
“I don’t see why Alabama didn’t take from Ned Weyburn,” said the elegant Miss Douglas with her hair like a porphyry tomb.
The yellow sun of the afternoon poured a warm vanilla sauce in the window. “Failli, cabriole,” Alabama bit her tongue.
Running to the window to spit the quick blood, she was overwhelmingly conscious of the woman beside her. The blood trickled down her chin.
“What is it, chérie?”
“Nothing.”
Miss Douglas said indignantly, “I think it’s ridiculous to work like that. She can’t be getting any fun out of it, foaming at the mouth that way!”
Dickie said, “It’s abominable! She’ll never be able to get up in a drawing room and do that! What’s the good of it?”
Alabama had never felt so close to a purpose as she did at that moment. “Cabriole, failli”——“Why” was something the Russian understood and Alabama almost understood. She felt she would know when she could listen with her arms and see with her feet. It was incomprehensible that her friends should feel only the necessity to hear with their ears. That was “Why.” Fierce loyalty to her work swelled in Alabama. Why did she need to explain?
“We’ll meet you at the corner in the bistro,” said David’s note.
“You will join your friends?” Madame asked disinterestedly as Alabama read.
“No,” answered Alabama abruptly.
The Russian sighed. “Why not?”
“Life is too sad, and I will be too dirty after my lesson.”
“What will you do at home alone?”
“Sixty fouettés.”
“Do not forget the pas de bourrée.”
“Why can I not have the same steps as Arienne,” stormed Alabama, “or at least as Nordika? Stella says that I dance nearly as well.”
So Madame led her through the intricacies of the waltz from Pavillon d’Armide, and Alabama knew that she did the thing like a child jumping rope.
“You see,” said Madame, “not yet! It is difficult to dance for Diaghilev.”
Diaghilev called his rehearsals at eight in the morning. His dancers left the theater around one at night. From the requisite work with their mâitre de ballet they came direct to the studio. Diaghilev insisted that they live at so much nervous tension that movement, which meant dancing to them, became a necessity, like a drug. They worked incessantly.
One day there was a wedding in his troupe. Alabama was surprised to see the girls in street clothes, in furs and shadow lace as they congregated at the studio. They appeared older; there was a distinction about them that came from the consciousness of their beautiful bodies even in their cheap clothes. If they weighed more than fifty kilos, Diaghilev protested in his high screeching voice, “You must get thin. I cannot send my dancers to a gymnasium to fit them for adagio.” He never thought of the women as dancers, except the stars. An allegiance to his genius as strong as a cult determined all their opinions. The quality that set them off from other dancers was his insistence on their obliteration of self to the integral purpose of his ballet. There was no petite marmite in his productions, nor in the people that he produced out of ragged Russian waifs, some of them. They lived for the dance and their master.
“What are you doing with your face?” Madame would say scathingly. “It is not a cinema we are making. You will please to keep it as expressionless as you can.”
“Race, dva, tree, race, dva, tree——”
“Show me, Alabama,” Stella cried in despair.
“How can I show you? I can’t do it myself,” she answered irritably. She was angry when Stella placed her in the same class with herself. She said to herself that she would give Stella no more money to teach her her place. But the girl came to her tearfully smelling of butter and the mechanics of life, offering an apple she had bought for Alabama or a sack of mint tips, and Alabama gave her ten francs anyway, to pay for the apple.
“If you were not here,” Stella said, “how could I live? My uncle can send me no more money.”
“How can you live when I have gone to America?”
“Other people will come—perhaps from America.” Stella smiled improvidently. Though she talked a great deal about the difficulties of the future, it was impossible for her to think further ahead than a day.
Maleena came to give Stella money. She wanted to open a studio of her own, and she offered Stella the job as her pianist if she could get enough pupils away from the classes of Madame. It was Maleena’s mother who wanted to do the dishonest thing—she had herself been a dancer but not a big one.
The mother was as bloated as the delicatessen sausages that kept her alive, and half blinded by the vicissitudes of life. In her pudgy, greasy hands she held a lorgnette and peered at her daughter. “See,” she said to Stella. “Pavlova cannot do sauts sur les pointes like that! There is no dancer like my Maleena. You will get your friends to come to our studio?”
Maleena was chicken-breasted; she performed the dance like a person administering lashes with a scourge.
“Maleena is like a flower,” the old lady said. When Maleena perspired she smelled of onions. Maleena pretended that she loved Madame. She was an old pupil—her mother thought Madame should have got her a job with the Russian ballet.
In watering the floor before class the watering can slipped in Stella’s hands and drenched the parquet over Maleena’s place in line. She did not dare complain, imagining that Madame would suspect her hostility.
“Failli, cabriole, cabriole, failli——”
Maleena slipped in the puddle and split her kneecap.
“I knew our chest would be useful,” said Stella. “You will help me with the bandage, Alabama.”
“——Race, Dva, Tree!”
“The roses are dead,” Stella reminded Alaba
ma reproachfully. She begged for the old organdy skirts which would not meet across her back and gapped scandalously over her dingy tights. Alabama had them made with four ruffles on a broad band that bound her hips—five francs it cost to get them ironed in a French laundry. There was a red and white check for weather like Normandy, a chartreuse for decadent days, pink for her lessons at midday, and sky blue for late afternoon. In the mornings she liked white skirts best to match the colorless reflection on the skylight.
For the waist she bought cotton bicycle shirts and faded them in the sun to pastel shades, burnt orange to wear over the pink, green for the pale chartreuse. It was a game to Alabama discovering new combinations. The habitual flamboyance expressed in her street dress flowered in this less restricted medium. She wore a chosen color for every mood.
David complained that her room smelled of eau de cologne. There was always a pile of dirty clothes from the studio dumped in the corner. The voluminous ruffles of the skirts wouldn’t fit in the closets or drawers. She wore herself to a frazzle, and didn’t notice about the room.
Bonnie came in one day to say good morning. Alabama was late; it was half past seven; the damp of the night air had taken the stiffening out of her skirt. She turned crossly to Bonnie. “You haven’t brushed your teeth this morning,” she said irritably.
“Oh, but I have!” said the little girl defiantly, angry at her mother’s suspicion. “You told me to always before I did anything in the mornings.”
“I told you to, so you just thought you wouldn’t today. I can see the brioche still on the front ones,” Alabama pursued.
“I did so brush them.”
“Don’t lie to me, Bonnie,” said her mother angrily.
“It’s you who’s a lie!” flared Bonnie recklessly.
“Don’t you dare say that to me!” Alabama grabbed the small arms and slapped the child soundly over the thighs. The short explosive sound warned her that she had used more force than she had intended. She and her daughter stared at each other’s red reproachful faces.
“I’m sorry,” said Alabama pathetically. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Then why did you slap me?” protested the child, full of resentment.
“I meant to make it just hard enough to show you that you have to pay for being wrong.” She did not believe what she said, but she had to offer some explanation.
Alabama hastily left the apartment. On her way past Bonnie’s door down the corridor she paused.
“Mademoiselle?”
“Oui, Madame?”
“Did Bonnie brush her teeth this morning?”
“Naturally! Madame has left orders that that is to be tended to first thing on rising, though I personally think it spoils the enamel——”
“Damn it,” said Alabama viciously to herself, “there were nevertheless crumbs. What can I say to make up to Bonnie for the sense of injustice she must have?”
Nanny brought Bonnie to the studio one afternoon when Mademoiselle was out. The dancers spoiled her dreadfully; Stella gave her candy and sweets, and Bonnie choked and sputtered, rubbing her hands through the melted chocolate that plastered her mouth, Alabama had been so severe about her not making a noise that the child tried not to cough. Stella led the little red-faced, gasping girl into the vestibule, patting her over the back.
“You will dance also,” she said, “when you are bigger?”
“No,” said Bonnie emphatically, “it is too ‘sérieuse’ to be the way Mummy is. She was nicer before.”
“Madam,” said Nanny, “I was really astonished at how well you do, really. You do nearly as well as the others. I wonder if I should like it——it must be very good for you.”
“Lord,” Alabama said infuriated.
“We must all have something to do, and Madam never plays bridge,” persisted Nanny.
“We get something to do and as soon as we’ve got it, it gets us.” Alabama wanted to say “Shut up!”
“Isn’t that always the way?”
When David suggested coming again to the studio Alabama protested.
“Why not?” he said. “I should think you would want me to see you practice.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” she answered egotistically. “You will just see that I am given only the things I can’t do and discourage me.”
The dancers worked always beyond their strength.
“Why ‘déboulé’?” Madame expostulated. “You do that already—passably.”
“You’re so thin,” said David patronizingly. “There’s no use killing yourself. I hope that you realize that the biggest difference in the world is between the amateur and the professional in the arts.”
“You might mean yourself and me——” she said thoughtfully.
He exhibited her to his friends as if she were one of his pictures.
“Feel her muscle,” he said. Her body was almost their only point of contact.
The saillants of her sparse frame glowed with the gathering despair of fatigue that lit her interiorly.
David’s success was his own—he had earned his right to be critical—Alabama felt that she had nothing to give to the world and no way to dispose of what she took away.
The hope of entering Diaghilev’s ballet loomed before her like a protecting cathedral.
“You’re not the first person who’s ever tried to dance,” David said. “You don’t need to be so sanctimonious about it.”
Alabama was despondent, nourishing her vanity on the questionable fare of Stella’s liberal flattery.
Stella was the butt of the studio. The girls, angry and jealous of each other, took out their spite and ill temper on the clumsy, massive Pole. She made such an effort to please that she was always in the way of everybody—she flattered them all.
“I can’t find my new tights—four hundred francs they cost,” flared Arienne. “I have not got four hundred francs to throw from the window! There have never been thieves before in the studio.” She glared at the dancers and fixed on Stella.
Madame was called to quell the rising insults. Stella had put the tights in Nordika’s chest. Nordika said angrily that she would have to have her tunics dry-cleaned; it was unnecessary, her saying that; Arienne was immaculate.
It was Stella who placed Kira behind Arienne that she might better learn by imitating the fine technician. Kira was a beautiful girl with long brown hair and high voluptuous curves. She was a protégée—nobody knew of whom, but she was unable to move without supervision.
“Kira!” shrieked Arienne, “will spoil my dancing! She sleeps at the bar and sleeps on the floor. You would think this is a rest cure!”
Kira’s voice was cracked. “Arienne,” she wheedled, “you will help me with my batterie?”
“You have no batterie,” stormed Arienne, “outside of a batterie de cuisine, perhaps, and I would have Stella know that I form my own protégées.”
When Stella had to tell Kira to move farther down the bar, Kira cried and went to Madame.
“What has Stella to do with where I stand?”
“Nothing,” answered Madame, “but since she lives here, you must not notice her more than the walls.”
Madame never said much. She seemed to expect the girls to quarrel. Sometimes she discussed the qualities of yellow or cerise or Mendelssohn. Inevitably the sense of her words was lost for Alabama, drifting off into that dark mournful harvest of the tides of the Sea of Marmara, the Russian language.
Madame’s brown eyes were like the purple bronze footpaths through an autumn beechwood where the mold is drenched with mist, and clear fresh lakes spurt up about your feet from the loam. The classes swayed to the movements of her arms like an anchored buoy to the tides. Saying almost nothing in that ghoulish Eastern tongue, the girls were all musicians and understood that Madame was exhausted with their self-assertion when the pianist began the pathetic lullaby from the entr’acte of Cleopatra; that the lesson was going to be interesting and hard when she played Brahms. Madame seemed to have n
o life outside her work, to exist only when she was composing.
“Where does Madame live, Stella?” asked Alabama curiously.
“But, ma chère, the studio is her home,” said Stella, “for us anyway.”
Alabama’s lesson was interrupted one day by men with measuring rods. They came and paced the floor and made laborious estimates and calculations. They came again at the end of the week.
“What is it?” said the girls.
“We will have to move, chéries,” Madame answered sadly. “They are making a moving-picture studio of my place here.”
At her last lesson, Alabama searched behind the dismantled segments of the mirror for lost pirouettes, for the ends of a thousand arabesques.
There was nothing but thick dust, and the traces of hairpins rusted to the wall where the huge frame had hung.
“I thought I might find something,” she explained shyly, when she saw Madame looking at her curiously.
“And you see there is nothing!” said the Russian, opening her hands. “But in my new studio you may have a tutu,” she added. “You asked me to tell you. Perhaps in its folds, who knows what you may find.”
The fine woman was sad to leave those faded walls so impregnated with her work.
Alabama had sweated to soften the worn floor, worked with the fever of bronchitis to appease the drafts in winter, candles were burning at St-Sulpice. She hated to leave, too.
She and Stella and Arienne helped Madame to move her piles of old abandoned skirts, worn toe shoes, and discarded trunks. As she and Arienne and Stella sorted and arranged these things redolent of the struggle for plastic beauty, Alabama watched the Russian.
“Well?” said Madame. “Yes, it is very sad,” she said implacably.
III
The high corners of the new studio in the Russian Conservatory carved the light to a diamond’s facets.
Alabama stood alone with her body in impersonal regions, alone with herself and her tangible thoughts, like a widow surrounded by many objects belonging to the past. Her long legs broke the white tutu like a statuette riding the moon.
“Khorosho,” the ballet mistress said, a guttural word carrying the sound of hail and thunder over the Steppes. The Russian face was white and prismatic as a dim sun on a block of crystal. There were blue veins in her forehead like a person with heart trouble, but she was not sick except from much abstraction. She lived a hard life. She brought her lunch to the studio in a little valise: cheese and an apple, and a Thermos full of cold tea. She sat on the steps of the dais and stared into space through the sombre measures of the adagio.
Save Me the Waltz: A Novel Page 17
