Death in the Fifth Position

by Gore Vidal

  This knowledge froze me and the rest of our talk was mechanical. I do remember, however, wanting to ask him why he hadn’t arrested Miles Sutton yet. It was very strange.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  “And then I told him that I thought I’d stumbled over the shears backstage, on my way to the dressing rooms.”

  “Good boy.” Mr. Washburn was properly appreciative, having no reason yet to regret that favor he’d granted me the day before at the point of a gun or, rather, of a pair of shears.

  “I wish, however, to record my serious unease, Mr. Washburn. I didn’t like Gleason’s questions. Just between us and the New York Globe he is about to pull something.”

  “But, my dear boy, that’s what he’s paid for. He will have to make an accusation soon or the city will be angry with him. That’s the price of office.”

  “I think he suspects me.”

  “Now don’t be melodramatic. Of course he doesn’t.”

  “I don’t mean of the murder, but … well, of being connected with it. My story about finding what is officially known as The Murder Weapon just didn’t go down. He knows it was left some place else.”

  “You don’t think …” My employer looked alarmed.

  “I just don’t know.” And we left it at that.

  On the way back to the office, I stopped off at Eglanova’s Fifty-second Street apartment. She had invited me to come see her and I knew that she was always at home to those she liked, which was almost anyone who would pay a call on her.

  She had the whole second floor of a brownstone to herself; it had been her home for twenty years and, consequently, it seemed now like a room from a Chekhov play: Czarist Russian in every untidy detail, even to the bronze samovar and the portraits of the Czar and Czarina, signed, on the piano, a grand affair, covered with an antique lace shawl and decorated with several more silver-framed photographs, of Karsavina, Nijinski and Pavlova. “They are my family,” Eglanova was accustomed to say to casual visitors, waving her long sinewy hand at the photographs, including the Russian Royal Family as well as the dancers. Over the mantel was the famous painting of Eglanova in Giselle, her greatest moment in the theater … 1918.

  Her maid opened the door and, without comment, ushered me into the presence.

  “It is Peter!” Eglanova, wearing an old wrapper, sat by the bay window near the piano, looking out at a bleak little garden in the back where one sick tree grew among the tin cans and torn newspapers. She put down the copy of Vogue she was reading and gave me her hand. “Come sit by me and keep me company.”

  I sat down in a papier mâché Victorian chair and she said something in Russian to her maid who appeared, a moment later, from the kitchen with two ordinary drinking glasses full of hot tea and lemon. “It is just right thing for hot day,” said Eglanova and we toasted each other gravely. Then she offered me some candy, rich creamy chocolates which made me sick just looking at them. “All boys like candy,” she said emphatically. “You sick maybe? or drink too much? American boys drink too much.”

  I agreed to that all right … if anything causes this great civilization of ours to fall flat on its face it will be the cocktail party. I thought of those eighteenth-century prints of Rowlandson and Gilray and Hogarth, all the drunken mothers and ghastly children wallowing in gin in the alleys … it makes you stop and think. I thought longingly for several seconds of a gin and tonic.

  “I couldn’t take class again today … too hot. I perish.” Contrary to vulgar legend the lives of great ballerinas are not entirely given up to a few minutes of graceful movement every night followed by champagne drunk out of their toeshoes till dawn, in the company of financiers … no, most of their time is spent in filthy rehearsal halls, inhaling dust, or else in class, daily, year in year out, practicing, practicing even after they are already prima ballerinas. It occured to me, suddenly, irrelevantly, that Eglanova was the same age as my mother.

  “I think Jane Garden is taking class this afternoon.”

  “Such darling girl! I hear she is your petite amie. So good for both of you.”

  “Oh sure … it’s wonderful.” News travels fast, I thought.

  “I’m so happy to see good children happy. Every night?”

  “What?” for a moment I didn’t understand; then I blushed. “Except on Wednesday, I guess, when she’s too tired.”

  “Just like me!” Eglanova laughed, a wonderful deep peasant laugh. “My husband Alexey Kuladin (he was prominent lawyer in Russia before) could never understand about Wednesday … I tell him about matinee but he would say: what difference?” She chuckled; we drank tea and Eglanova asked me more questions about what Jane and I did and what my habits had been previous to our affair. I told her a number of stories, mostly true, and she loved them. She was like one of those old women you read about who brood over an entire village and are never shocked no matter what happens … good witches. She made everything seem completely natural which, of course, it is or should be … she even regarded Louis with delight. “Where does he get the energy? where?” I had just told her about my run-in with him. “He works hard most of the day and at performance. Then he goes out and he drinks, oh, like an American, or maybe Russian … then he picks up one tough boy; then maybe another later on, not counting the people in the theater. It is wonderful! Such vitality! So manly!”

  I wasn’t convinced of the manly end of it but then it all depends on how you look at such things … he certainly acts like a man and there may be, who knows, not much difference between nailing a boy to the bed and treating a girl in like manner; it’s all very confusing and I intend one day to sit down and figure the whole thing out. It’s like that poem of Auden’s, one of whose quatrains goes:

  Louis is telling Anne what Molly

  Said to Mark behind her back;

  Jack likes Jill who worships George

  Who has the hots for Jack.

  Kind of flip but the legend of our age. Anyway, it may all be a matter of diet.

  Eglanova wolfed down a couple of chocolates; I tried to recall if she were married at the moment but when I attempted straightening out in my mind the various marriages and divorces and widowhoods, some known and others suspected, I found I could not remember even half the names, mostly Russian ones, of her husbands and protectors … as they used to call boyfriends in the wicked days before the First World War.

  “She will be lovely dancer,” said Eglanova, her mouth full of chocolate.

  “Jane? I think so, too.”

  “She is warm … here.” Eglanova touched her liver, the source, she said, of a woman’s deepest emotion. A man’s was somewhere south of the liver and much less reliable as a center of intensity and artistic virtue.

  “Do you like her in Eclipse?”

  “Very much. So strong. Is bad ballet of course.”

  “Bad?”

  “Very bad. Just tricks. We do all those things in nineteen twenty. We groan and suffer on stage for not enough love. We act like machines. We did everything then. Now American boys think it modern. Ha!” She gestured scornfully, sweeping the copy of Vogue off onto the floor.

  “When did you see it?”

  “Last night only … I was in final ballet so I went around front.”

  “Sutton did it well, too.”

  Eglanova’s face darkened. “Such tragedy!” she murmured intensely.

  “The funeral was pretty awful.”

  “Disgusting! Miles is fool!”

  “I guess he was too broken up to make much sense about the arrangements.”

  “Broken up? But why? He loathed her.”

  “Still … it’s a terrible thing to have happen.”

  “Ah!” She looked menacing. “If ever woman needed murder she did. But Miles was fool.”

  “Why?”

  Eglanova shrugged. “How can he get away? It is so obvious. I know … you know … they, the public, know.”

  “But why don’t the police arrest him?”

  She spread
her hands, yellow diamonds gleamed in dusty settings. “It is like ballet. You go slow. You introduce themes. Male solo. Female solo. Ensemble. Pas de deux. They know what they must do.”

  This unexpected coldness was too much for me. “You sound as if you want him to be found out.”

  “It is not what I want … no, he is fool. His only hope was they could not prove he did it. But they always can once they know. Today they almost did.”

  “When?”

  “This morning at the … what they call it?”

  “Inquest?”

  “What funny word! Yes, they make it clear they watch him. He will not conduct tonight … or ever!” she added … this time like a wicked witch placing a curse.

  “You sound as if you hated him.”

  “I? I hate Miles? He is best conductor I have had since Paris. I shall grieve when he is gone … you may be confident. No, I am angry with him. He wants to kill wife … fine! I am all for it … like nature: get rid of what does not make you happy. If he tell me first, if he come to me for advice, I say, certainly go kill her but do it natural … so you won’t be caught. What is point of getting rid of nuisance only to be put away yourself? I have contempt for bad artists. He is hysterical fool. He lose his head. She refuses to give him divorce so he rushes backstage and cuts cable. Then he is in trouble.”

  “Perhaps he didn’t do it?”

  “Oh yes he did … Miles is only person who is big fool enough to do it that way. I push her out of window in fit of anger. Ivan or Alyosha would poison her. Jed Wilbur would shoot her … Louis he would strangle her. Psychology!” said Anna Eglanova, winking solemnly at me.

  “You seem to have thought a lot about it.”

  “Who has not? Remember I am the one who must dance with that assistant conductor leading the orchestra always two bars behind me who am always on beat. I am martyr to this man’s foolishness.”

  “Are you glad of the new season?”

  Eglanova sighed, “Ah, Peter, I am old, I think. Thirty-one years is a long time to do Swan Queen.”

  “But you’ll never retire?”

  “They will carry me protesting from the stage!” she laughed. “They will have to kill me, too. And I tell you one thing … no fall from a cable would break these tough bones!” and she slapped her thighs.

  Alyosha Rudin, in a white suit, stood in the doorway, bowing. “Shall I go away?” he asked gallantly.

  “My old friend has caught me in a compromising situation! Defend your honor, Alyosha! challenge him! I demand it!”

  He smiled and took my hand, forcing me gently back into my chair. “Don’t get up. I will sit here.” And he pulled up a deep leather chair and joined us by the bow window. “I am too old for duels.”

  “How he has changed!” mocked Eglanova.

  “But only for the better, Anna, like you.”

  “For that I give you chocolates.” He actually ate one, I saw, marveling at his constitution … in this heat a lettuce leaf seemed too heavy for my stomach.

  “I have been with Miles,” said the old man. “He is in terrible state. I think he will have a breakdown, or worse.”

  “His own fault.”

  “Be charitable, Anna.”

  “I am not responsible for his condition. I told him six months ago to divorce Ella no matter what she said … go ahead, I say, you have one life; you don’t live forever … go ahead, I say, and divorce her whether she likes it or not. What can she do? That’s what I told him.”

  “But Anna, obviously she could do something otherwise he wouldn’t have waited like this; and then …”

  “Killed her! Such big fool!”

  “We know no such thing.”

  “Oh, we don’t ‘know no such thing,’ ” mocked Eglanova. “Tell that to this fat and ugly man who smokes cigars … tell him.”

  “I know it looks very bad.”

  “Oh … but I forget. The little one …”

  “Magda? Her family is with her. What more?”

  “Ah, what more indeed!”

  “Then you know about Magda?” They both looked surprised, as though I had suddenly asked where babies came from.

  “There are no secrets here,” said Alyosha gently.

  “And now, can you not understand why I am furious with that idiot? It is all right to kill the wicked, to kill oneself, but not to hurt an innocent, oh, that is not moral … I swear that is wrong … Alyosha, tell me, tell him, that it is wrong.”

  “Sad … too sad,” murmured the old man, accepting tea from the maid.

  “Has Miles been to see her?” I asked.

  “I think so,” said Alyosha, “as often as possible … but it’s not been easy.”

  “The police?”

  Alyosha nodded. “It is the end of Miles if they find out and they will certainly find out … something which is known to fifty people is hardly a secret.”

  “The fool got desperate,” said Eglanova, pointing her feet. “She would not free him and there was the other girl enceinte … such mess!”

  “Why was he afraid to divorce Ella?”

  “Who can tell,” said Alyosha uneasily.

  “Who can tell? Ha! I can tell … in this room at least. She would have exposed him. She was capable of that … he told me once that she’d threatened to make public private things if there was divorce against her.”

  “What private things?” I asked.

  “Anna!” Alyosha’s usually gentle voice was harsh and warning … the way it was at rehearsal when the corps de ballet was off.

  “Why make such secret? It is obvious to all but a baby like this. Miles takes drugs … not little ones like so many music people, no, big ones, dangerous, expensive ones. The sort that will kill you. I should know. My husband Feodor Mihailovitch died from opium at the age of thirty. He was big man, bigger than you, Peter, but when he died he weighed five stone … how much is that? seventy pound!”

  2

  Miles Sutton was not at the theater that night. According to the note on the bulletin board, he was home, sick, and until further notice the orchestra would be under the direction of Rubin Gold, a bright nervous young man with insufficient experience and a regrettable tendency to follow the music instead of the dancers.

  After taking care of my usual chores at the box office, getting all the movie stars in their seats and one thing or another, I went back to Jane’s dressing room, my first glimpse of her since our hung-over morning.

  She was just getting into her tights when I marched into the dressing room. “Good God! You frightened me.”

  “You don’t expect your buddy to knock, do you—or send a note back?”

  “Of course not.” She went on with her dressing in spite of a number of distracting things which I thought of to do to her just then, those little peculiarities of behavior which are always a lot of fun at the time but might look alarming to a man from Mars, or even to a man from the police department. “I don’t know why I’m so jittery,” she said. “But I tell you I know something’s going to happen.”

  “You mean to the cable?”

  She yelped and looked at me furiously. “Don’t even suggest such a thing! No, I was thinking of Miles. Everybody says the police are ready to arrest him.”

  “What’s been puzzling me is why they didn’t do it a long time ago.”

  “I don’t know … not enough evidence … oh, darling, I just feel awful.”

  I had a brave masculine moment, holding her in my arms while she shuddered a bit and gave way to some healthy old-fashioned female nerves; then, remembering that she was a dancer and not a woman, she broke the clinch and began to paint her face.

  “Did you see Magda today?” I asked.

  She nodded. “The poor thing’s out of her mind … her family isn’t much help either. They’re very Boston and though they’re perfectly nice to her you can see they think it’s the end of the world, her carrying the bastard child of a murderer … oh, it does sound awful, doesn’t it?” Intently, she placed a
set of eyelashes in place.

  “How come you never lose them?”

  “Lose what?”

  “Eyelashes … Sutton used to lose them every performance according to legend.”

  Jane laughed. “I thought you asked me why I never lost babies … I stick them on with a special mess … all the girls use it. Oh!” She turned around suddenly. “Did I tell you that they are going to give me Coppelia?” This called for a number of congratulatory words and deeds and the time passed pleasantly until Jane had to go backstage and do a few pre-performance knee bends and pirouettes. I walked with her as far as the long wooden bar near the tool chest; then I left her.

  I paused for a moment and watched Eglanova in Giselle … it’s not my favorite ballet and it’s certainly not my favorite role for her. I am told she was once very fine in it but now she seems coy and unconvincing, too old and wise-looking, too regal, to play the part of a girl gone soft in the head for love.

  During the intermission, I headed for Sherry’s, the bar upstairs at the Met, where I found Mr. Washburn taking his ease in the company of my old employer, Milton Haddock, who was his usual noble drunken self, dressed casually in tweeds, horn-rimmed spectacles (old school, prejunior executive: they curved); he looked very distinguished in a sottish way.

  “Wonderful to see you, Mr. Haddock!” I exclaimed, pumping his hand.

  “Why, hello there, George. Haven’t seen you in a long time.”

  “Not since New Haven.”

  He clutched at the clue. “Streetcar Named Desire wasn’t it? I remember now. You were at that party afterwards … some party. The Scotch flowed like the Liffey.” And he swallowed some more of it since Mr. Washburn was providing same gratis.

  “And to think this is the man I worked for for four years,” I said jovially to Mr. Washburn, regretting those three fours: after all it was my prose style which made Milton Haddock the trenchant critic he is today, the adder of the Rialto … or at least the garter snake of Forty-fifth Street.