Girl Through Glass Page 15

  Before I realize it, I’m standing in front of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, another building of glass and steel, this one built in the 1960s. I do something strange: I wave the business card around in the spring air, as if to summon something. But what? There is nothing. There is only the past, my past, the detritus of it all around me. What can I do except wade through it, picking up pieces and examining them? I stare at the card, and the name on it. Suddenly, now, it all seems too real: this half-baked plan of mine to find out if he is still alive and how much guilt I should bear for his life—and my own.

  CHAPTER 24

  LATE SUMMER, 1978

  On the morning of the SAB auditions, Mira wakes early to a city that spits and shines like jewels. Outside her window, the sky is bright with early white light.

  She pulls on her favorite pair of tights—Capezios, three washings—and a black tank top leotard. Then she pulls off the tank leotard and puts on a new spaghetti strap one that Judy had bought for her just for the audition.

  It’s a warm day, late summer. She pulls on a cotton dress and packs her dance bag. She looks around. Her room feels smaller. She sits in the squat brown living room chair that smells of shampoo, waiting. She can hear her father snoring through his half-closed door.

  Leaving her father sleeping, she gets up from the chair and lets herself out of the apartment.

  Outside the city explodes with light. She sinks into the light, not running from awning to awning for the shade but taking the middle of the sidewalk.

  She walks to the Lincoln Center fountain, bright, parched concrete. Maurice is waiting by the fountain. He wears the same black cape and a black top hat, which he removes when she arrives. Girls in buns with their mothers file by. He says, “Remember the Russian Tea Room when we saw Mr. Balanchine?”

  How could she forget? The blood soup that tasted like dirt, the pale woman with the glittering ears, the golden clock that churned in the middle of the room.

  “The Russians are scientists of the body. They have studied these things. The legs must not be too short, the head not too big, the instep pliant. It has taken them a hundred years to get the proportions right. I hear they do X-rays in the Soviet Union, but here parents wouldn’t like that. But why not? It’s better to know before serious training begins. Otherwise, it’s a waste of everyone’s time.

  “Aside from this, they will be looking for one thing: that you know the steps. Don’t worry about holding your pretty arabesques, just be quick, and clever, and to the point.”

  She looks at him. Her face grows hot as the morning sun. She imagines him kissing her the way that Christopher was kissed by the jester, smothering her, taking all of the anger out of her, draining her of everything.

  She nods. Her blood in her ears. She understands.

  The SAB hallways are packed, filled with hive-like activity. Girls in leotards and tights, mothers stiff-backed, like generals before a march, sitting on benches. Each girl wears a number pinned to the front of her leotard.

  She passes a plumpish girl. A girl who smells of a strong flower perfume. A girl whose mother is straightening the seams on her tights, a girl who wears her bun high on her head like a geisha, one girl, an older girl, Robin’s age—where is Robin?—whose feet poke out of her cut tights showing reddened, calloused, and bent toes, another older girl whose spine is so bony that you could play the xylophone on it. She passes a girl wearing a monogrammed robe and another whose father hugs his daughter to his chest, saying, “Do it for me, please.” One girl’s mother—a skinny woman with giant glasses—stands over her daughter while the girl does sit-ups.

  Here she is not a girl who trusts too much, a girl who closes her eyes, a girl who lies in the hospital bed while they wash her big face off her little one. Last night, on the mattress at her dad’s apartment, staring at the ceiling, freshly painted white, she went over the steps as if going over multiplication tables. She gave each step a numerical value and added and subtracted until she arrived at a number she assigned herself. Now she feels a bolt of confidence, the kind you feel when you open your blue booklet and realize the test question is the one you studied for. Quick, and clever, and to the point, Maurice said.

  In the office, a woman has Mira write her name in a book. Then she gives her a piece of paper with a red number on it—146—and a safety pin.

  Mira goes to the end of the long padded bench, peels off her street clothes. Next to her stands a girl with an amazing turnout. This girl’s mother wears a white leather vest, white rhinestone-studded pants, and heels. She says to Mira, “I had a hell of a time getting here. An hour and a half on the Queensboro. If Felicia gets in, we’ll have to move to Manhattan. She’ll need a chaperone. And, I mean”—she leans toward Mira, so she is talking to her—“there are worse things for mothers to do, right?” The lady’s red lips part in a smile. For a moment, Mira wishes that this glamorous woman was her mother.

  “I live with my father.” Mira uses a new, clipped voice, a Manhattan voice. She does not mention Judy or Sam.

  The woman looks down at her hands. “Every situation is different, of course. But for Felicia, I would definitely need to be here.”

  Felicia’s mother keeps talking, and her voice blends with the clomp of girls walking down the hallway in their pointe shoes, and the call-outs from the ballet masters in the audition studios, and the piano swelling up and then crashing to a stop. The girls five or six numbers ahead of her have begun to disappear. Mira catches Felicia’s gaze, and the other girl smiles, humble and sweet, a smile that so belies her well-trained body and pixie-cute face that Mira, despite her best effort, smiles back.

  A brief barre and then they move to the center. The steps are not difficult, but they are done faster than she is used to.

  The old Russian teacher speaks little English. Her English, when it emerges, is almost impossible to understand. Mira stops trying to understand. Instead, she just watches the old woman’s hands. Though veined and gnarled as old tree branches, they are quick and expressive. Watch them carefully and you can see the footwork. This woman was once, Mira sees from her hands, a very good dancer.

  She follows this wordless direction, the old Russian teacher’s fast-moving hands. Then she is warm and not thinking anymore. Her regular mind is asleep; her snake mind is awake. She is dancing. But the other girls haven’t figured it out. There are girls with too-pointy faces and girls with too-round faces. When she sees them lined up in the mirror, her in their midst, she can see each one’s imperfections; it’s like an extra-special super power she has. Felicia of the perfect turnout is also managing to follow along. Some of the others are just standing and watching her and Felicia. A few of the girls have begun crying, softly. Others are flailing, turning blindly this way and that, beating their legs haphazardly, in their lovely leotards and their perfect buns. A girl runs out of the room. Another girl stands still without blinking, a stunned look on her face. They must avoid this girl—sometimes knocking against her.

  The teacher adds yet another movement phrase, and now the combination is full of twists and turns, two allegro parts and one adagio, followed by another allegro. The only way she can keep going is to follow those hands, which, perhaps without her teacher’s knowledge, mold and shape, dropping clues.

  The teacher smiles at her and Felicia and the one other girl who is keeping up. She is a tall girl with stick-straight brown hair that has escaped from her bun, legs like stilts. No. 152.

  “Okay, girls. Yes? We begin.”

  She understands that she has beaten these other girls. What is easy for her is hard for others! In this controlled competition, unmuddied by kindness or the pretense of equality, she has won. Mira lifts her chest, raises her arms, beats her feet in time to the old Russian’s gnarled hands. She hears Felicia’s ragged breath beside her; she hears herself gasping for breath like someone who has been submerged too long.

  The woman in this office has a helmet of tightly curled hair, hard, painted nails, a
nd a strange accent. She wears a heavy gold pin held on a bright, geometric-patterned jacket. Behind her is a framed series of old-fashioned-looking prints and an orderly bookshelf of bound books. Even the light from the shutters falls in disciplined strips across her body. Suddenly Ms. Clement’s flyaway hair and watery bug-eyes seem wrong to Mira. Horribly wrong.

  The lady asks her one question: “Do you want to be a dancer?”

  “Yes,” says Mira. But, she imagines her mother saying, she used to want to be in the circus too. And before that a veterinarian.

  Her stone-gray eyes have the slightest smile to them, and in her manner, Mira understands, this woman is inviting her to embrace the gold pins, the quick short words, to enter the land of wanting, of becoming. There is no place in this world for Mira’s mother. The woman flicks her eyes away and adjusts a gold watch. There’s nothing her mother can do. She’s not here.

  “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  The lady smiles quickly at Mira.

  “I was the Flower Princess,” Mira says. The woman nods, but it is already over, their moment of connection. “Congratulations and welcome to the School of American Ballet. You will be in Second Intermediate Level. This paper has your schedule on it. You will be expected to come to all classes. If you stay, and if you advance, you will need to come to daytime classes. This may require that you go to a special school. Many of our children go to Professional Children’s School.” The woman makes marks on a piece of paper and hands it to Mira. “You have some parents—some mother? Some father?”

  Mira nods.

  “Ask them to inquire into it.”

  Back outside, she stops in the middle of Lincoln Center. Her mother’s voice is back. What a bitch, Rachel would have said. What a total bitch.

  That evening, she and Maurice dine at Café des Artistes. He wears the same black cape and a black top hat, which he removes when she arrives.

  He assesses her with his special glance.

  “They checked your extension?”

  “Yes,” she says, remembering the woman’s strong hands pulling her leg to her ear.

  He nods. “They want to make sure they are loose enough—the tendons.”

  The arch? The femur? Those old, alive hands feeling through her skin for her bones. The audition studio, cold as a refrigerator. Barres against the bare walls. The gray floor, a veneer like wax paper. The old woman came around and lifted their legs one by one. Another woman followed, making marks in a ledger. Mira’s leg went up; the old woman asked her to point her foot. She said something and the other woman wrote something down. They spoke in Russian. It sounded both gravelly and fluid.

  Her bones are the right size, the right length; she has been measured, vetted.

  Overcome by hunger, Mira reaches for the bread and the butter knife. Her roast chicken dinner arrives as she is buttering her bread, and she cuts the flesh and the juices flow. Mira swallows, the cool taste of chicken dimming in her mouth. It is exotic, delicious, like something dug up from the earth. Yes, her mother is gone—but, like a girl in a fairy tale, she has been given a substitute. An admirer: as rich as her father, as doting and attentive as a mother should be. She gets up to go to the buffet and returns with a pile of stuffed mushrooms. How she loves stuffed mushrooms.

  Mira nods. She is going to be a ballet dancer, she feels it. Her bones will knit together in new ways. Her torso will lengthen. Her hands will grow strong, her fingers blunt, and her feet rough and calloused as tree bark. You will see the tendons in her neck, and her elbows and her knees easily hyperextend. Her hip ligaments will become so loose that whenever she sits on the floor, her legs will roll outward and her heels will touch. Her breasts, when she grows them, will remain as small foothills with no real valleys. She feels Maurice’s eyes on her, pricking her skin, buttressing her. How simple it all seems! She will stay this way forever. Her head is shining, she is buzzing with light.

  He says to her: “I will call you Bella. You are not Mirabelle anymore. You are Bella.”

  MR. B’S GIRLS

  CHAPTER 25

  PRESENT

  “Does a Robert McAllister work here?” I say to a tall man wearing poodle cuff links and a badge around his neck. I’m inside the library now, at the information desk.

  “Rob?” he says, and for a moment I think he will laugh at me. “He’s in Special Collections. End of the hall, turn right. Elevator to the third floor.”

  I pass a photo of Mikhail Baryshnikov in his prime, and a bunch of framed Playbills from 1980s dance and theater, and a large glassed-off display of Sesame Street muppets. I get on an elevator.

  On the third floor, I check my bag and coat, go through a metal detector, and enter a large, featureless room where a few people are hunched over old-looking books and sitting at AV machines. I follow signs to Special Collections, a far outpost. Here is a desk where an older man in a plaid shirt and badge sits. I take a deep breath and head toward him. He looks up from a computer. He has a close-cropped beard and dim watery eyes. He is very old.

  “Excuse me,” I say. “Hello. Are you Robert McAllister?”

  I can recognize little of the man I met one night thirty years ago. The chiseled line of the jaw is gone, the face is now ovalish. I think of that younger version of this man saying, “I’ll leave you two alone,” and how those words have echoed through my life. I finger the envelope in my pocket. I almost turn to go. He’s looking up at me, this old man, waiting.

  “Yes,” he says. “How can I help you?”

  I take a deep breath. “My name—I—I’m Kate Randell.”

  He’s looking at me with confusion.

  I look down. “I’m working on a paper on Nijinsky’s sister.”

  “Oh, well, we have some great resources from that period.” He turns toward the computer screen.

  “Wait,” I say, pressing myself against the desk. In a hurried whisper, I say, “That’s not why I’m really here. I think I met you once, a long time ago, one night, at someone’s house, his name was—is?—Maurice. I was just a girl then, really a little girl, well, not so little—fourteen—you might not have thought I was little—maybe I looked older—”

  Rob looks at me. Our faces are very close. “My god,” he says. “I always wondered—” Then the deep lines in his face smooth out. He sits back in his chair. “Are you hungry?” he says.

  We go to an overpriced coffee shop across the street. When we’re settled at a table with menus, he looks right at me.

  “My god,” he says again. “How did you find me?”

  “I have the business card you left for him that night. For this library,” I say. I hand him the card. “I actually can’t believe you’re still here.”

  He laughs. “Yes,” he says, fingering the card. “They wanted us to be anonymous. But I begged to differ.” He hands the card back to me. “They never gave us business cards in those days, so I had one made for myself. That’s how much I wanted to impress him. There are very few of us left from back in the day. I’m semiretired. I’m in only two days a week these days.”

  A waitress comes by. He orders a salad and I order a soup, but there’s no way I can eat.

  He says, “You know, I was the one who found him.”

  I try to hold his gaze but can’t. I look outside. A van drives by with a sign that reads Gum Removal Specialists!

  I look back at him. “Did you get—in trouble?” In trouble? A child’s words.

  “They questioned me.”

  I blurt it out. “Did he die? Is he dead?”

  He looks at me carefully. “Those are two separate questions. I know the answer to one, but not the other.”

  He looks away for a second, then back at me. “He did not die—not that night.”

  I wait for it to sink in. The pain of not knowing and the fear of knowing all wound up together have apparently made a knot under my ribs, because now I feel that knot loosen and something flow out of me. It’s physically painful. It pools out of my rib cage, down my arms.

 
“Are you okay?” says Rob.

  I nod. “Go on. Please.”

  “He was in the hospital for a while. They had to make sure. He had a seizure and there was some paralysis on his left side—which was, as you know, his bad side.”

  “The polio.”

  He nods, takes another bite. “But, no, he did not die. Slowly, with a lot of physical therapy, he recovered use of his arm, but not much of his leg. He never was able to get around very well after that. He had to be under supervision. Constant care.”

  The pain—or whatever it was—is gone, and I feel a hollowness under my ribs. Cripple to invalid! I search my mind for legal terms that might apply: battery, assault? But not: murderer. Into that space rises a pure sweet relief.

  I look at Rob, searching for more. “I just need to—to know.”

  “It’s complicated,” he says finally. “He was not a bad man. But his relationship with you was not right.”

  He looks at me then, really looks at me. His once-chiseled face, sagging with age, the roots of white bristles showing, those kind blue eyes. His eyes look beneath the freckles, beneath the skin, into the deeper rivers of my being. It’s like he is seeing into what I was before Maurice came along, before so much was decided. And in looking that far, he touches on something that reminds me of what I was, what I could have been, before I knew so certainly what I wanted, before Maurice had said to me, “You have to say it, say what you want.” And in seeing me that way, seeing into me before I was me, I feel something returning, something even sweeter than relief.

  “I never felt like a child.”

  “No, I don’t suppose children like you do.” I look away, dab my eyes with my napkin. I try a sip of the coffee.

  “Walking was very hard for him. After a while, he moved to a facility that could care for him.”