There’s a closet under the stairwell where I crouched. …You and I hid in it once, later; I could feel you feel me there, and not touch. …I hid in it now. Against the shame of Anna’s coming down, against my pains—and against the listening. I belong in my mother’s line.
I heard Anna come halfway down the stairs and stand there. For a moment, with her there, my mother giving tongue in her bed, and me clutched over my new swollen belly with its moil of eels, the house was all women. Then my mother stopped. Then the man uttered. Then Anna crept back. And I was left to give birth, under the stairs.
In the slums, girls do it that way. And if it’s a lucky miss, throw it in the can. Sometimes even if not. I had heard of it. I had nothing like that to give birth to, yet I was filled. Crouched there, hearing her rail at her lover, not at me—did he know it was for the world?—all my body-images mixed—with hers. Eyes oozing upside-down color, ears expletive in the dark, my brain was damp on my forehead with the sweat of it. In bicuspid darts of pain, my tongue tore at my hymen, which would not break. Then an animal spoke, piteous—she—and her throat swallowed my heart. I broke from the closet, carrying my belly, and ran to her. I thought she was crying. I had to see,
She was trying to get him to murder her. But he wouldn’t. His gun was out of his reach, not hers. “Get the gun!” She said that to him. Her wish was so clear to me. At the end, she saw that. She saw me. What she had done to me. And what I would do—for her. She tried to say it all, so quickly. The words came out in that utter truth of hers—double. Somebody had to ruin us. But she never meant, always meant it to be me. “Help me!” she said—“escape.” Other nights I might not have been her daughter so dutifully, but that one night I was. Life is movement. The little gun, clean and gray, was on her dressing-table, beauty’s toy, often in her handbag. We’re all of a piece here, nothing comes out of the wings. Hysteric with life’s messages, I picked up the toy and saw her approve. In monstrous love and tenderness, I gave her the hate she could get from no one else.
“It’s come, Mirrie,” I said. “The blood.” I could call her Mirrie now. She was only an older girl who had given birth to me. Or I had. To her. I remember the moment of death is guiltless. I saw.
As my father ran in and to her, she met him with her answer. She had stopped. As he turned to me, to pick me up, the real thrust of my blood gave me mine. I could have walked my pains, but it was too early for it. The gun dropped from my hand. Vol de nuit.
Austin, Austin, do I understand everything? You hold the catatonic’s hand as if she does, and is about to tell you it. I try to imagine that I already have. From Dukes to Covent Garden is a fair way by foot, but the mind’s path is quickest, getting even behind death. Its light-years steadily reach their star. All the way over here, it shone its story into your waiting face. You sat just as you sit now. Your face, now that I’ve reached it, is the same. Grave, a man’s face which has kept the promise of the boy’s—eager to be haunted by me. Yet I am still mute. All I could say when you opened the door to me was Walter. Even his death seemed to me still so far in the future that it had scarcely a voice. It takes time. To come forward to you. Yes, Austin, I know you’ll wait.
Bear with me. I have just shot the gun again. I have been mute like this before…
When my father came to my bedside with the doctor, I’d already heard that great clear cry of his stumble through the house. I hear it yet. There’s nobody young enough to mourn her. Why? I was young enough. If I’d opened my mouth, I’d have said that to him. Of my father the Judge I had never been afraid. But I had robbed him forever of being Si to her. I felt that Si in him already reach out to me. And was afraid. So I said nothing. Once I answered a question from the doctor, but that was nothing.
When I woke from the drug, David was lying across the bottom of my bed. I woke straight into his eyes. We are left, his eyes said to me—we two are left, to deal with it ourselves. They had left us together, or bowed to it. And after a while he could speak. He had had to learn how to, once before. He expected little more of speech than that. Or not as much as we. “You saw?” What should I answer? “Did she—do it?” Yes, no; yes, no. The double message. Now I harbored it. So I said nothing. Even when my brother said, “We will protect him.” Straight into my eyes.
When Anna came into my room again, at the sound of my brother smashing his way through the rooms below—we clung. What control it took from her, against her lifetime care of our objects, not to go down and stop him! I felt it shiver her, like a prayer. And guessed it wasn’t me she asked and got her guidance from. Let him, Anna, the voice said. It’s me, in him! So we listened together this time, and clung. I had no fear of her from then on—it is good to have one like that. But I had already spoken to her that once—too much. “Sleep!” she said, straight into the face of the morning. She cradled me. “Here it is night.” So I had to shrink a distance from her too. In her huge, faithful dreams she’d have made a daughter of me. Or a mother. That “night before” when nothing had happened yet, how could I make it come again, except as I did, from then on? Except in a lifetime, who could remember it?
So I became intelligent. And mute. The brightest animal in the wild is the one who manages to live on. Every breath against his skin changes the direction of his cells. Sensation—a brilliant tic-tac-toe always at work in the vitals—is his thought. I was that creature now. At school, they were always setting us projects, teaching us to live ourselves into living. Cowering in the cloakroom of their sympathies, the day I returned there, I conceived my own—and was grateful. I was to pretend I had words, and knew how to sup with human spoons. I had to pretend I was not in the wilderness. Oh, that’s already human—yes I know that now. Everything is human that we do against the wild.
But then—I was grateful for anything the concrete could give me. Consciousness, when first frightened into being, wants all the more to live by the fence post and the stone. The human part is in speaking of it at all. Where I might have to lie. But I could have told anyone at once, like a shot, what I was afraid of. Anything in the bestiary describes its fears—as it moves.
Remember that rainy day we were all down in the basement telling our worst dreams—or elaborating them? My brother said, “I dream I’ve lost another sense—like touch. Awful.” Walter, ever agreeable, answered. “Then I dream that the rest of you are crooked. And poor Suzy Stern is out of step again—he’s straight.” “Oh Walter, you’ll die agreeable,” you said. Austin, how did you know—so early? Isn’t that why I’ve come to you? Like I almost told Augusta, once. We tell the ones who almost know. Because I feared these explorations of the quick, I said, “Suzy, Walter? Do you dream you’re a woman?” “Oh, no, half-chick,” he said. “That must be you.” How I loved you all, always, for laughing at me. At me. “Your turn, Austin,” I said. You were always bad at these metaphorical games we injured ones loved. “Oh, I don’t know,” you said. “Dreaming old Latin tests maybe.” We didn’t laugh at your normality; we were too much in awe of it. You are romantic to us.
Then it was my turn. How grateful I was to the ballet—for providing me with stage fright. “I’m on—in a solo I never heard of, which the audience knows by heart. I can see them, a thousand dolls, all alike—” But I was never good at it, either lying too little, or too much. “And two, first row front, whose faces aren’t blank,” I said. “Those are the worst of all.” The rest of you were silent. Then you said, “What’s that in your hand?” Nothing. Thumb over three fingers clenched, the trigger one pointing—but nothing. Only my fear that the fire of thinking might explode like smoke—in my hand.
The ballet was my place to hide. No real dancer does that. It’s their speaking. The wind blows through them—she was right. They quiver with it. I can’t do that—not in the dance. Maybe there’s still some other way, I used to think, that would be mine. But I always know when they are speaking that way—without vanity, not for themselves. That’s why, later, Madame let me stay.
That first month after
, Ilonka’s was where my muteness went unnoticed, and I could heal. She allowed mere babies on pointe too early and too much, but I had just come to it, late. To pack the box of my shoe with lamb’s wool was a poultice, to dip it in the rosin, a ritual. Sewing at our ankle elastics, poring over old prints of Camargo in la cachuca, Fanny Elssler, Karsavina, Pavlova, we were novices imitating our saints, some of whom were still alive. Old custodians of the order came to sit on the gold-chaired sidelines, nodding their coifs from ruffles that smelled of maraschino and chocolate, pinching our unformed muscles with their eyes. When for three days running the assistant mistress, whose much-argued custom was to put a spot of glue between the heel of her tights and her shoe, had a broad raveling rise up her rear while she was at the bar—was when I found I could smile. I carried the smile like a bonbon, home to my father. Who was saying good-bye to Augusta in the hall.
She cupped my face. “You still look seedy,” she said, and traced the purple under my eyes.
“We’re learning the single pirouette from the fourth position,” I said, measuring the distance to go past them. Un petit changement de pieds—and I could make it. “It’s hard.” For in the dry marionette words of the ballet, those light, eighteenth-century improvisations for the clockwork of the limbs, I had found my way back to speech again. What better way to learn the terrain of one’s tongue, and how to walk backward, forward, from an event? They were both watching me.
“I saw Nijinsky once,” said Augusta. Great poor dear, with those shoes of hers from some improbable bottier of the past, she belongs to that long line of spinsters who have had tickets to many halls—once. I stared at her feet; ballerinas do. If anything could make me cry, it would be those Watteau boots—on her.
“Your—” My father, moving suddenly in the shadows by the newel-post, squaring his shoulders, only making himself smaller. He’s never realized how many times he mentions her—by default. Under Augusta’s inexorable family eyes, he went on; we all knew the story. My mother had met Nijinsky at fifteen, when she and her mother were going round the spas, “—your mother met him once.”
In my mind, I did a quick petit échappé, pas de bourrée, and got past them. You’ll understand I named the steps only in my mind, often jumbled and incorrect, while my feet moved almost normally. But it was the way I was managing. These exact orbits took the terror out of space. Under stress, they still do. And it hadn’t been a month yet. “So did Ilonka,” I said coolly, and was past them and up the stairs before what I had felt in Augusta became clear to me. We were both a little afraid of him. But after that, he and I could speak…Austin…it’s when he mourns that I am most afraid of him. Until today, I never knew why. I thought it was because of her…
And then—the month was up. Until then, I’d never dared visualize my secret. Or had no words for it, in any pattern. In the depths where such things rested, its image steadfastly withdrew and yet remained, a hot, glowing cave, arched like a red Moorish window and blank, what one saw when a human finger was held against an electric bulb—mine. Now, each month of the menstrual round, my mother came into that cave and stood there—in all her—attitudes. She had more of them, in every combination and alternation than we’d ever been given at Ilonka’s, in any mode we had ever struck there, in all the dimension there was. Croisé, effacé, en avant et à la seconde, en l’air, en diagonale, she knew them all, although the vocabulary—come down through the long chaines of those winged daughters of the dance passing it along to me with their wreathed arms—was mine. Port de bras. So, each month, we began to put each other through our paces. She and I. So I showed off to her what I knew, as we did to the older girls, as I do now to you. So, finally, one month, we were dancing together. Grand jeté en tournant entrelacé. Sometimes her hair was down, sometimes up; my head was often bowed, hers flung back, mouth ashriek. But always we were silent. Then she transcended that too, and began to speak. And I began to listen to her. In all the words she had ever said.
So, month by month, I gave birth to her again, but gently. We give birth to our parents, through the past. I only did it a little early, before my time. She stood still now as she spoke, neither awake nor asleep but gently dreaming. Of me.
Until Madame. What Ninon knows of it all I can’t tell. She has her own allegory, literal as an ant’s. But Madame’s power was to make each of us see ours. I can hear her at the novices, that summer of the war—at a student newer even than me—a pink chalice of a girl, still swollen with the air of Wales. “You’re a pewter candlestick, my girl. But you shall still shine.” So a girl would be told—that she never would be silver. “Woman-lump!” she’d say. “Add a few slivers of gristle, you boys. That’s all a troupe is made of. After some pre-selection in the provinces, frequently wrong.” After a while, we began to see it all for ourselves. “But born perfection doesn’t interest me. What I like to do is polish the flaw.”
She’d lift her chin at us—an ugly Pierrette who had done it well. She only looked ugly when she chose. We were never to forget—that sometimes she chose. I never did. At the back wall of the practice hall, Rupert, the perennial assistant—lamed, it was said, in her service—slouched on his shoulderblades, with an “’Ear, ’ear. Spirit of Dunkirk itself!” One of the third-year boys hushed him—we all knew she wasn’t really French. Her lies were as transparent as the glaze the cook put on the Sunday buns, through which we could see, just in time not to break tooth on it, the hard wartime truth of Saturday’s dough. Rupert, upper-class we suspected, had become Cockney in sheer imitation. Or that was the part she had given him. To be her interpreter, full of just such lèse majesté.
“Her’s an obsessive,” he said one day, adding a dollop of the broad Dorsetshire that surrounded us. “’Ow, Rupert,” said a girl, in craven imitation. “Y’r sow original.”
He was going down the line of us at the bar. “Got bad feet, gives you time to think anything up…God’s sake, Mavis, crack that elbow. Is it Isadora you think you are?” Mavis snickered, but sobered. Madame often sent off the failures here into that other dance world, as to the tumbril—with some tender remark—“You’ll love it there—they’ll teach you to hiccough from the waist.” And Rupert went on musing, slapping in a girl’s hip with the side of his hand, twisting out another’s kneecap, down the bar. She’d chewed him out that morning. “Not a romantic, mind, that’s what’s so bracing about our Ninon. Her’d murder her mother, her would. If it would give us a better Swan Lake.” “Here, Ruth—hold on to the bar.” He always dropped his fooling for the new ones, the untalented—and for me. “Hold on to the bar if you still must. But turn that ankle out.”
I held on—Austin, it’s much better when it comes that way, natural—and knew that I never wanted to go back to our house. “’Swat’s wrong with ’Itler,” said Rupert, going on to the next in line. “’Swy ’e’s so original. Thinks too much. Got bad feet.”
So, under the domain of total ballet, I began to see the world as it is. Often the balletomane himself doesn’t know that this is what he’s really watching. My mother, girl-haunter of other studios, had known it best at the end. All the way from Covent Garden,—linked with Places des Opéras and solid Ilonkas round the globe—I began to see our walks for what they were. But it was Madame—who gave us all her confidences publicly, and never asked for ours—from whom I took instruction. And it was Ninon who relieved my mother and me of our dance.
As for my father, who likes to quote his old preceptors—how I yearned to quote him mine. Through her, I still thought I might be able to tell him everything. Those years, that’s how I managed to live with him, my part of it. She was only teaching me to go forward again. Some day, I thought, I would know how to let him take my confession from me, so I could take his burden from him. I could let him see that what I had given birth to was my own. It would happen, I thought, where Madame had given me my rank in the company, my true role.
Once Madame had awarded a person his or her rank, it was held sacred by all, never protested, least o
f all by the recipient, who was helped by all to act it out—that’s what a company is. We craved that discipline. We wanted to be ranked. Oh there were furies and catcalls, and jealousies about roles in the repertoire—“Take any four women, and it’s a jungle,” said Rupert. “Especially when some of them are boys.”
But the rank itself was always sacred—the guild. Once we flew across the Channel, the whole troupe on a gala weekend, then by bus to Chartres down the new highroad he said the French wouldn’t admit was a copy of the Autobahn. When we stood in the nave, in that rotunda where all the stone people are in their ranks of noble and grotesque, a mixed guild of the ages, here a Grisi or a Marie pleine de grâce—Taglioni, and there in that dark corner an Eglevsky, Rupert raised his putty nose di mezzo-carattere against one of their stone ones, swept an arm against that whole medieval circle of them, and said what we were all thinking; “Why—it’s only us!”
And afterwards, they made a game of it. “There’s Danilova as the queen; no, it’s Gollner.” Others stood in front of their counterparts, waiting to be noted. And someone whispered, “There she is, in Sylphides.” She, that one of us who was already great, or about to be, stood aside. As did I. I couldn’t find myself anywhere in that round. I stood where I knew I must be—altogether out of the ranks. And Rupert, the ever-noticing, fussing us back into the bus, stuck next to mine his true gargoyle face that belonged anywhere, any time, the backbone of any company. “Bide your time, bunny.” Ninon hadn’t come along. “Why does she keep me on?” I said. He was embarrassed. They thought I didn’t know my father had been her lover. I looked back with Rupert, at that pile of spires. “I didn’t see myself. In there.”
A male dancer at his best has a cruelty which extends from him like perfume. He must think only with his body. Kindness is out of his sphere. Rupert knew which lack had lamed him. “In there with us?” he said, mugging. “How can the girl expect it!” He gave me a push on the buttock, onto the high step. “Into the bus with you. American.”
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