New Yorkers (79 page)

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 of 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.”

That was the place I came to have for most of them. Sometimes, Ninon may have been seeing my father in me, but I knew I puzzled her in myself. I would have told her the plain facts. “But what were they?” said my mother, striking a match. And in what words would I tell them, I wondered—like Rupert’s that day at the bar? But the body was Ninon’s direction. She would never answer me in any other terms. When we asked for direction, she never answered us otherwise. Demonstration was required—of our own secrets most of all. She would take up the chalk. I could see her mark the large X on the floor. For my mother. Maybe a circle round it. “Or does she move?” Madame would say over a shoulder, as she knelt. “Speak up, girl. In your dream, does she move?” I would know better than to answer, “She speaks!”—hearing the reply, “We have no recitative, here.” But I could come forward, to stand on the X. “
If
she moves, Ruth,
you’re
to make us see it. Or partner will, at your command.” Then Madame would hand me the gun, according to what she thought me capable of—a toy got from the prop-room, or a black soft shoe with its uppers gone. Or a four-inch block of air. “All right, now. You’re going to tell us. How it was.” Madame never said “show.” “Ready, Ruth?” Then a clap of the hands. “Dance!”

And as I dance it out endlessly, I hear the sibyl-voices, hers and hers, my mother’s and Madame’s, both of them dancing on the practice floor of my mind. Men inherit the houses, and the wars. We inherit the sibyl-voices. Unidentified or known, they wash over us—which of them the mother-by-choice, which not? “The moment of conception!” says a voice—“There a magnificent ballet, for you! The motile sperm, more instant than thought. And the ovum, arrived slower than an infinite line of tortoises—already there!” Is that voice my mother, moving my hand over the stylus of sexual knowledge prescribed—or Madame loftily guiding our feet to some early notations of Laban? “The ballet is virtuoso calm, demoiselles, in the center of feats of strength. Action is ceaselessly resolved.” That’s Ninon for sure, quoting from some old master whose name she’ll never give us—who we believe to be herself. “We’re
always
trying to get out of the cosmos!” says that other sure one, ceaselessly resolved.

The chronology is endless. I used to try. One day, I was dancing by myself in a corner, half watching myself in the great mirror which had migrated from Dorset to London, war to peace, effortlessly as a sky—when Madame came up behind me and stood. The technique is to go on dancing; I was good enough to do that now. Madame made a sign, and I continued backward from the glass, until our images stood beside each other. I was a head taller than she now, though I was not on pointe. She spoke to the mirror, not turning her head. Was she going to assign me a rank in the company? Often she let a girl know she was going to be kept on by a casual, “Take one of the blue lockers. From today on.” Her voice wasn’t like that; it gave me no rank. It was like the atelier-master’s downward sweep of the pen, correcting the apprentice’s drawing of himself. “You always dance backward, away from. Never
toward.”
She kept her eyes on mine in the mirror. And never asked me what it was I was still moving away from—in a revulsion so deep that it was calm,

Sometimes there would come a day when Madame was deep in one of the grand invocations she made almost to herself, beginning low with the low:
pas de chat, de Basque, sauté de;
on from
glissade
to
entrechat six de volée, sissonné tombé
to
failli
—ever on to even wilder astrologies in her quest for the impossible. She would turn suddenly even on some prima who was slacking off. “When did they practice to the left in your school—in their bath?” Then I used to think that surely she would notice me also. To say, “Ruth, Ruth—walk
toward.”
Or that she would notice—toward the end of a session, when the body carves itself almost free of its own sweat—that I was doing it. But she never further instructed me. So, the years went on, and I came to have my place. I was the dancer without rank.

Once a year, usually at end of term, when she was having to send the younger ones off before their characters were formed safe against the solider fantasies of Surbiton, or the seniors to grand performances they might fail to recognize, Madame had a speech she gave us. “Oh God, here it comes,” Rupert would breathe, perfectly audible. “’Virtuous calm, girls! Virtuous calm.’” While she gave it, that chant to the impossible she required of us—or hoped—I watched her feet, clothed now in plain pumps. No leather could hide that great squared-off metatarsal. “The arch that has soared never sits well again in the shoe!” said Rupert in my ear. Around us, heads hung embarrassed—hadn’t Madame herself always said it—a ballerina should
not
speak? The word “assoluta” is rarely heard among them. Nymph in the cave of all their thoughts, she moves with the most silent, unrosined footfall. Madame, in these moments, is only Ninon, pink-ringed and raucous-voiced, pimping for her own vision.

“Why does she always look at
you?”
says Rupert, and his tone, kind but puzzled, carries all my rank. Yes, she is looking at me as the speech ends, always on the same syllables, “—impossible.” She too must have received her answers early. How else could she describe such Snow Queens, such nymphs that the wind blows through—so well? How better describe that silent partner of mine, my mother, than by staring at the ones without rank, like me? I turn to answer Rupert, grizzled boy, lamed in a service too. “She knows what she can’t be,” I said. Like you, Rupert. Like me.

…There’s your telephone, Austin. Yes, go answer it. No smell of girls here, is there? I know you. You’d hunt the red Indian in Soho—but never bring her home, unless she was from home. But point of honor—if all the women you’ve ever had chose to call just now—you wouldn’t lower your voice. Why must I know us all down to the root? Will it be good for you and me, that I know you so well? As I know who you’re speaking to. Voices that speak to
him
are always the same. Mine was, until today. When we talk to him we deceive ourselves, but find out, later. What’s a judge for, if not that? It’s me he was mourning all that time, wasn’t it. As a man does mourn, against all bloodstains, all wives—the child born to him. Poor man, he never knows in time what’s vital to him. I can love him now. If I don’t have to talk to him…