New Yorkers (23 page)

Madame brought them into the house to await tea, along with—as she said crisply—“some locals” still to arrive. Meanwhile she laid open for them a huge folio of manor houses of the region in which the house took honors it didn’t need, and even showed them its main glory, the free-hung, carved ebony staircase which led to her own oaken, fifteenth-century quarters, straight on in to the curtained Tudor bed which was as she said “too late” for the room, and to his pretty image of her in the bed—a small, jewel-winged, post-Tudor fly. Later, when he charged her with that purpose, it wasn’t coyly denied.

In front of a Spanish mantel piece which she told them had been brought over before the Armada, she said to Ruth, “Of course I know Pauli, how else do you suppose you got here, at your age!”—and to the Judge, “Pauli’s
father
was our musical director, in my first opera house engagement. And of course I knew Leni later on, a prima ballerina she then was. In the provinces. But even so. And in Munich,” she said. Madame’s face darkened; minute as it was, it had scope enough for the Germans.

Her intense silences were un-English, if not French, but actually more a part of her style than of her opinions—a concertmeister’s emphatic of life.

“Is Ruth too young?”

They both looked at him, then Fracca at Ruth. “Fourteen?” she said, with a swift, inclusive glance.

They examined one another. Their laughter sounded together, pretty as bells in the vaulted room, and as chill.

“Too old,” said Ruth. She said it first.

Madame smiled at her quickly, with interest. She leaned forward, chin on hand, legs tucked back like a dragonfly’s. “In Munich, two years a ballerina, I was not yet sixteen. I was never a prima. Later on, Leni was. At eighteen.” She spoke yet more softly. “Here in England before the war, at the theatre we sometimes had apprentices, who help. Later they assist the directress, study choreography, or the costume. And of course they dance too, like everyone here. For a summer—it would be possible.” So Ruth had been arranged for—for those weeks while he would be going up to the danger zones of London, to certain marked towns in the dreary undersides of “neutral” countries, and to a few unmarked cantons, from Basel to the Valais.

When the locals arrived, a modest brother-and-sister pair of gentry from the nearest reigning big house, and the headmistress of a neighboring school, who clearly held both them and the district in her intellectual power, Madame stood up, a figure finial to the massive fireplace behind her, as if its tumbled gray carvings, arriving headlong down the centuries, were brought up short before this small, heraldic construction in bone. She still possessed the ballerina’s cool, pulled smile, and didn’t clasp hands with anyone except herself, inclining forward so from the ankle, elbows lifted, each palm after a moment placed on an invisible pannier at her side. Except for this mannerism, and the scale to which she had been embodied (one thought of it that way, as if there’d been a choice), there was nothing to relate her to certain long-gone miniatures, enamel and real, of his father’s Paris. Yet this was the moment at which he himself had been arranged for.

They had tea from the Stukely silver, and after that the daily war news, handed round like a snuffbox from which each impassive face took its bitter pinch. The headmistress, as if to palliate this with art’s quick perfume, then urged Madame to repeat for them some of her own history. From this they learned that, born on the Ile St. Louis, daughter of a housekeeper, she’d had a perfect childhood, commodious, clean, and situated among servants as devoted to their group life as the members of a commune. Who liked Riviera sun, ate fish with the aristocratically simpler sauces and reserved radical opinions on the city, though rarely deserting it. The judge, keeping his own counsel on her nationality, thought she had somewhere known upper servants very well.

From her own moderate bed—not the one in Dorset but a couch in the white-painted studio, lined with mirrors and practice bars and theatre caricatures, which she kept on under blackout in a street of barristers’ eating-houses not far from the Savoy, behind the Strand—he had learned more. Born of a size to command, if never to be material for a prima, she’d grown up to a nose sharp and pink as a carrot, large swallow-colored eyes, and an intricately tendoned body in which the calves were the size of the breasts, the buttocks round and rosy-muscled, the waist sunk like a wedding ring in the sloping tutu of the hips. Between, the mound was bare as the armpits and not shaven, but in what she said was an old habit of the profession, plucked. Above all this a practical, steel-wired brain lightly rode her shoulders, as if in the adagio.

They laughed at each other, hand to hand, in the mirrors; they were of such a neatly matched scale. Agile from sailing, at the bar he did knee bends, which she called pliés, and he made a stab at their alphabet, finding that some of it—arabesque, pas seul—had been given to literature and the world at large. But he couldn’t really credit a universe whose whole center was the business of moving the body to music. She told him, with coolly anatomical jabs of the fist here, and here—that he could never have made a dancer; embedded within him were the stolid bones of men half again his size.

“But incest was never my pleasure,” she said, smiling. The troupe was indeed her family, and he surmised, though neither pressed the other to talk of former loves, that her alliances had always been culled from the outside. He realized that he himself had never before chosen a woman, large or small, because of her size. But there was more to it than this of course on closer acquaintance; physically she was like a trinket, but with the procurer’s mind proudly in evidence, royally in the service of the exquisite. He couldn’t now imagine any other woman who could have as dryly led him back to the sexual. Her ego wasn’t for itself only, but for the troupe. Emotionally she was narrowed, the springs of her energy coiled round the passion of grace, even if it should be (as some said of her influence on the dance) the grace of ugliness. Her own art, clenched as it was in the total body, could never be as impalpable as the athletes of song or instrument. But she had the performer’s certitude: that heaven was attainable in the performance—
here.

The war had perhaps subtilized her a little, as war did all onlookers. But she still had the pug-and-terrier politics of the street corner; to her, accession to power in the world was a matter first of the proper patron and then the lingo. It was this which made him place her, if not in Les Halles, then in the back and vegetable end of Covent Garden. Remembering that plucked pubis and certain winning coarsenesses of the bed, he would not have been surprised to hear that at the earliest she had at times been on the streets. What she would never be able to understand about the world of the intellect, his or any, was that it wasn’t fixed—that its own towers still strove with one another, Guelph and Ghibelline. She had arrived like an arrow on its mark. She would never be middle-class.

So it was wartime that had really characterized their affair, and their parting too. In the undercover but informal way in which the military had arranged his and Ruth’s departure—“My own little gel is with a very delightful femmily in Ko-nek-ti-cut—perhaps you and your daughter would be kind enough to call upon her?”—he and Ninon had accepted the unlikelihood of anything more.

“Does Ruth have the bones for it?” he asked.

They were once more in the vast practice room down in Dorset, with its elegantly drear look of a ballroom gone permanently to hard work. At the far end of the nut-brown floor, a few of the eternal nymphs here were stretching at the bar, with centrally absent stares, hands clasped to ankles, as if studying the metaphysics of splitting themselves in two. One dreamer was stubbing her squared toe in the rosin box; it was more probable that she wasn’t dreaming at all. He thought that Degas had understood them best, that the romance was always forward of them and even of the footlights, in the burnt scarf-tones and slate shadows in the eye of the painter, or the burst of spangles within the stage door—and once in a while, at the heights, in the ethereal pyramids and rosy formulae they made of themselves. Three of them passed him and Ninon now, going down the floor in perfect trance, exfoliating like flowers under film.

Ruth, who had finally danced for him (in a sextette so trimly matched to the accompanist’s modish valse and to each other’s angles that he could scarcely distinguish her) had slipped off to change into her travel suit, and no doubt to be kissed all around; they lived their whole lives here in nosegay. Even this woman here, at their very center, did this. Now, by some alchemy she distilled at will—by gathering in the room with a proprietary glance, raising her head Titania—he was being conveniently told this, graciously being dropped from his brief ennoblement.

“Oh—she has the bones. She is not as tall as she looks. Which is correct. For these days.”

“But—”

“And she has the need. One has to have that to be anything. I am not sure that otherwise she—But she has that. It is recognizable.”

He waited for her verdict. To have information on his daughter be the issue of his own love affair was in itself a marvel of how life transmogrified itself—always planning off and away, never quite terminal, even at the end. Through the mist of assessments and interviews—from schoolmistresses, doctors, and always the willing priests that one’s friends were—he yearned toward what his mistress could tell him better about his daughter than any of them: what his girl was.

“But—” He heard himself. Did he fear to be told that she was good for anything except his protection?

Madame’s tipped eyes glanced away. She reflected, on that group now at the far end of the floor. Though her voice was clear, he had the peculiar sense that he was lipreading.

“My girls aren’t stupid. Never think. But Ruth…She could be—a good enough dancer. And she would work. But she had too much—Not
mind.
Not like you. Maybe—
control.
” She smiled. “Like me.”

She leaned forward. “She’s been excellent, with the others. Almost their elder—you know they squabble like ducks. Very tender with people, she is. I know girls. Such a quiet charm, like a bell that’s never struck. But one knows the sound of it.” She herself laughed softly. “I find myself as intrigued with the daughter as with—” And let that drop forever.

“Has she ever—confided in you?”

“No.” A business voice. “But sadness at this time is not unnatural.” She rippled that out in the flat neutral of her directive to the accompanist—
un poco andantino, non vivace.
She sat very straight; “What a back Madame has!” was always said from behind her. “She can be very
fun-ny
in ’er little way.” The intonation was pure Cockney, as she tipped her head at him. “Did you know?”

He could wonder forever now whether she’d mean he had no sense of humor. That being what was sometimes said behind
his
back. Just then Ruth did come out from the dressing-room and they could both see her, surrounded by good-byes. “Maybe I can come back,” they heard her say. “After the war.”

They watched her, in that international posy of girls not the center, though it was she who was being said good-bye to. Was it only the travel dress? Or because it had been hinted that he fancied it? That alongside the dramatically servile body-rhythms of the others, all pliant to some beat they demanded be demanded of them, she would not blend? Could not.

“She is an assoluta,” said Ninon. “Of somewhere. But not of the ballet.”

They watched her come toward them with the same little duck walk as the others. As a parting gift, the others had done her hair up in a chignon. Elbows out, she clasped her purse in front of her. When she reached Madame and her father, she would bend her neck in the proper little obeisance with which all classes ended here, one foot toed behind her, one arm extended. It was always impossible to believe that one’s children might be more intensely at the task of life than oneself.

He felt Ninon’s whisper warm his ear, the last unaudited word they exchanged. “She means to be happy,” Ninon said.

In the train down, reading the official account of the troupe in the signed album of pictures which Ruth was given in farewell, he learned that Madame, its long-time directress, was aged fifty-five.

But now, in the immenser dialogue of the sitting-room, as it took place each day—a body-rhythm that beat outward and beyond him—he could forget his daughter and himself, in the act of suspending them both in the larger rhythms of the world. In this room which had once been a bedroom, the small questions of particular life, murderous or joyful, pleaded themselves from his wife’s desk, were asked of the wardrobe, which had no permanent inhabitant, and were answered, answered and rebuffed, tossed up shining for what they were, and sunk again in the waves that shook the wardrobe from beyond and flowed unceasing even through houses, front to back. Sitting so, he could see how certain men, made monks by time, sat in the silver silence of their rooms and received, as if from the wainscoting, the Chinese secrets of age. The peacock’s-tail of his own thought unfolded before him, in every frail inch of it a spreading eye. All his thoughts existed at once in this fan. Behind it the waiting pulses of life were held in abeyance, as tarnish holds light.

For a time, his own memoir of his father, of him and half by him, lay on the desk. Only the title, “How War Never Comes,” was much his own, and the seed of that taken from Olney. Often now, he felt without amaze—except at how long it had taken him to see this filial ultimate—that he was thinking his father’s thoughts. Why that should be so strange for modern times, he couldn’t say—only that it was now considered odder for a man to be doing this than it ever had been in “modern” times before. His father too had written his papers, on “world” law most of them, his own curious phrase for “international,” really an inaccuracy which merely sounded modern. The fragments he had left behind were a gentleman’s, that is unpublished, and when reread—all those faint, Edwardian approximations of the great nonquestions which would shake that golden world—so courteously second-rate. The one long-lasting idea his father had bequeathed him—only an image really, or an excitement, and blended now with Chauncey’s “families that breed behind the lines”—had come in conversation, handed over to him in a restaurant, flecked up from that bon vivant current of living which both he and his father would have had to call frivolous—if ever either had dared to speak openly from their joint kernel of Jahveh’s law. One of the arguments for the existence of God must be that some great hand reaching down was always needed to pluck the nutmeat of a life.