Girl Through Glass Page 21

  The walking is good for my body, which is sore from lack of movement. Usually a day doesn’t go by without me getting in the studio or working out. The haziness has burned off now and the sky is a tepid blue.

  While I am waiting for a light, I call my mother, but then hang up before she can answer. Did she not get my message that I’m in New York? I left it on her cell before I left Ohio. It’s weird that she hasn’t returned the call. I think about texting her, but she has an old clam-shell cell and limited texting. She says she doesn’t see texts. Sometimes I worry about all the communication she misses.

  It’s midafternoon when I arrive at the law office address, a tall glass and steel building on Park Avenue, at the center of New York corporate power. The computerized kiosk in the lobby lists a Kevin Fox with a multiname firm on the thirty-ninth floor. My amateur sleuthing has proved worthy. I am absurdly proud. I am going to meet Maurice’s lawyer and I will find out once and for all where Maurice is, if he is still alive. If Kevin is, in fact, Maurice’s son.

  But I am not ready yet. I leave the lobby and retreat to the low stone steps of a church across the street. The afternoon is slipping away. The sky has solidified into an iron-clad blue, a brilliant color that accosts the eyes. I bought a pack of cigarettes and allow myself a few. To the south, in a store window, is a big Easter display—all bright pastels and fake green grass.

  Next week I’ll be back in Ohio, picking up where I left off. But back to what? The smoke claws at my throat. A car’s tires screech. The stone steps are scratchy through my pants.

  I check my e-mail on my phone and find one from Bernadith. I hear Bernadith’s tired, authoritative voice in it.

  Kate, I’m sorry to tell you that there has been a report filed against you by a student. For inappropriate behavior. You will shortly be receiving an official e-mail. Let’s discuss when you return.

  I turn off my phone, push it deep into my bag, and watch the sky begin to change, shadows lengthen, until the street is cast in a glow from the descending sun. The sky is now purplish, ripe. How long have I sat here? I’ve spent fifteen years of my life studying dance history. What are my options besides the academy? Limited, to say the least. Have I just been traveling in circles? And here I am, right back where I started? A girl lost in the grandeur of tall buildings.

  Perhaps I have always waited for this moment. Maybe I allowed myself not to know what happened to him. His continued presence in the world was the best bet for keeping in touch with the self I missed and mourned, a self I had never been able to say good-bye to. If he was alive somewhere, then somewhere my beautiful and perfect past self survived, too, and that was an equation that I didn’t want to disturb.

  Maybe.

  I wanted to tell you because you my dear are one, one of the dead, you will always be—

  It’s time. I get up and brush myself off—somehow a layer of soot has formed on me—and cross the street. In the florid glare of a late afternoon sun, I enter the building.

  SLEEPWALKER

  CHAPTER 35

  PRESENT

  I take the elevator up to the thirty-ninth floor. The atrium is black granite. Orb-like lights reflect on the floor like miniature suns. A mahogany desk, solid, unimpeachable (such a contrast to the all-light-and-air SAB studios) dominates the entrance to the office, but it is unstaffed and I move unimpeded into a carpeted hallway. A few young lawyers scurry by without giving me a glance. I hold my purse tighter, walk the hallways, glancing at the names on the doors. The assistants’ desks are mostly vacant on this late Friday afternoon, stacked folders and pictures of smiling children.

  I keep walking, fewer and fewer people pass me. Finally, among a row of offices, I see his name on a gold-plated nameplate on the door: KEVIN FOX, ESQ. A pool of light shines from the open door, the second to last on the hall. Will he have answers for me?

  I fight the urge to run back down the hall.

  I open the door and enter.

  I look around the large office. The mahogany desk, the diploma, the potted plant, the giant plate-glass window, the glittering city against a sherbet sky. A computer station off to the side of the desk, a moonscape screen saver. Next to the desk are several piles of file boxes and stacks of legal folders. At the desk sits a young man reading papers in the light of a lamp; he looks up when I enter. He is a small man and his delicate features are dominated by severe wire frame glasses. The body is the product of many hours at the gym. The face makes my heart pound.

  I stare at him without knowing what to say.

  “Can I help you?” he says.

  “Are you the executor of Maurice Dupont’s will?” I ask. “He was a donor. To the School of American Ballet. They referred me to you.”

  “That’s confidential.” His tone drops an octave. “And you are?”

  I move a few feet into the room. The smell in this office is strange—potent, fertile. I think of trees, of rain, until I realize it is the smell of coffee. There are coffee mugs all over the office.

  “Kate.”

  I’m only a few feet away from him. I can see he wears a heavy gold signet ring set with a blue stone.

  “That ring,” I say. “It was his.”

  I pull out the envelope with Maurice’s letter in it and lay it on his desk.

  A funny look crosses his face. He sticks his hands in the envelope and pulls out the letter, opens it and reads. His face turns a strange color. He doesn’t seem able to look at me.

  “It came to my address. My home address,” I say. “Which also is confidential.”

  Finally, he looks up. His face has changed and softened. His eyes look wet behind his glasses, but I wonder if it’s a trick of the light.

  “It’s our curiosity. It’s so human, really, the most human thing,” he says, stepping around the desk toward me. His eyes are strangely wild, and for a moment I’m afraid. What if he is crazy—or violent? If I had never followed Maurice that day to his apartment when I was eleven, everything would be different. Have I learned nothing? I take a step backward.

  But he isn’t coming toward me. He’s bending over and opening the drawer of his desk. From it, he pulls a packet of letters bound with a rubber band. “He gave me these—‘Here,’ he said, ‘these are for her. If you find her.’”

  I reach out to take the letters. There are about twenty or so, some written on Florentine paper like the one that I received in the mail. These look the oldest. But there are many others, written on other kinds of paper—pastels, crisper designs, perky retro colors. It feels like the weight of a stone has landed in my hand. All these words Maurice had written. To me. Over all these years.

  I take the top letter out and unfold it. It’s dated September 4, 2014. A year and a half ago. Fifteen years after I went to grad school. Thirty years after the last time I saw him. Thirty years after I moved in with my mother. I skim the letter, then begin shaking.

  This, then, is my life waiting for me. Like some savings I had held in abeyance, all being spent now, at this moment.

  Dear Mira,

  Before I die, I want you to know that I’m sorry for what I did to you. I’m sorry for ruining a young life, for tying it in knots that you’ll probably never be able to undo. I taught you to harden your heart as you strove. I taught you to prize only your value to others.

  I have lived a long life, much to everyone’s (my own especially) surprise. Old age has taught me humility. I am able now to see things I couldn’t before. How much damage I’ve done. I am sorry for what I did to you.

  I harassed you with my wishes, my dreams, my desires. I wanted the perfection of steps, a vision of loveliness. I hungered for beauty like only the dying can hunger for it. I wanted to continue living, although I myself was half dead. I wanted these things out of a terrible need and they made me who I was—who I am.

  I am sorry. I hope you can forgive me.

  I look up. “Is he dead?”

  “He passed away six months ago,” Kevin says.

  I fold the letter
, tuck it back into the pile. I look for a place to rest my eyes—they find the moonscape screen saver, undulating.

  I try to take this in: the monster-prince of my childhood is gone. Maurice is gone from this world.

  After a moment I say, “If he was already dead in March, who sent the letter to me?”

  Kevin fiddles with something on his desk. He doesn’t—or can’t—answer. When he looks up at me, I see the furrows in his brow. Behind the mask of the young professional I see the pain, the attempt to relieve it in work.

  “Let me explain.” His eyes dart to the window, then back. “I was engaged. To a great person. We had planned everything—our whole lives. Then on the train back from a client’s meeting . . .” He looks right at me. “A heart attack. At twenty-six. They said it was a congenital heart defect, undetected.” His eyes are brimming. “At first, I couldn’t. Then I realized I could bear it. I would just have to be a different person living a different life.”

  I feel something inside trying to stem his words, to shut down. But another part of me is opening up.

  “So two years ago—after my fiancée died—I began to search,” he continues. “It took me a bit, but I found him. Maurice. I found my father.” He continues to stare directly at me. “The papers had his name. When my mother signed them, she added his name. That was unusual—for the situation.”

  His gaze is disconcerting. I haven’t felt this visible since I was onstage as a child. His eyes are bright—unbearably, ridiculously bright—behind his glasses. My old purse has become very interesting to me. I slip the stack of letters I’ve been holding into my purse. “And your mother?” I mutter.

  “That was much harder. My mother was very young. She changed her name when she had me.”

  I don’t dare look up. The office feels like it has shrunk around me.

  “But after he died, I finally got a name—”

  I’m making strange sounds, low, and wounded. I realize that I’m crying, that’s the sound I’m making. I hear someone knock on the door. Kevin walks out from behind his desk, tells them to come back later, and shuts his office door. He goes back to his desk. When I finally look up, he is staring at me so simply.

  “You can’t bury the past,” he says.

  “But my name—”

  “There’s a record. There’s always a record.”

  I wipe my eyes with a tissue from my purse. “Rob said—but I didn’t think. I couldn’t. It wasn’t possible.” I nod, blow my nose, even give a little laugh. How shoddy, how childish, my attempts at not being found, at changing my life. How bold they seemed at the time. That dusty room at the courthouse. The line of divorce-seekers, of name-changers. That adult land of mistakes that one has to pay dearly for in paperwork and in emotional toil. The bleak but steady wind outside the courthouse. It was something, it was the beginning of something else.

  I look at the wall and see an incongruous thing in the room: a photo of Pavlova bent over her leg. The same one Maurice had in his gallery of ballerinas past.

  “So you sent the letter,” I say. I’m trying to order things.

  “Yes, I sent it,” he says. “He wrote it, but I sent it. When he died, he left me the execution of his remaining estate. But the most difficult thing for me to adjudicate”—he adjusts his glasses and gives an awkward laugh—“was these letters. He had left them for you—my mother.” He takes off his glasses, cleans them with a cloth from his pocket. He puts them back on and blinks at me. His eyes look clearer, as if the cleaning of the glass polished his actual eyes. “One night, sitting in this office here—after he was gone, I sat with the letters in my hand, feeling—well, sorry for myself. I took one of the letters from the pile, without even reading it—and put it in an envelope and sent it to the address I was given. I sent the letter to you. It’s his, but I sent it.”

  “But—” I say, stupidly—“how—if he was already dead?”

  “I took the train to Armonk and then a cab to town, and dropped it in the mailbox. Then I took the train back.” He has pantomimed these actions with precision and grace. I watch his hands, pale and manicured, but muscled and precise. too. The very exact and intelligent way he moved had an almost mechanical affect that I recognize from Maurice. I always thought that was the result of Maurice’s illness, but maybe it was just him.

  “He was forty-something. I was fourteen.”

  “I know,” he says. “He said, ‘If you find her, be kind to her. She was—a child.’” He paces in front of his desk, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. He was so hobbled, so compromised—I can’t imagine. The polio and then the stroke. He couldn’t move around much at the end. He was confined to his bed. Tremors wracked his body. He’d had them for years, but they’d gotten worse after I found him. They came every few minutes and left him exhausted. This was only a few months before he died. Every time I visited, he’d say something mysterious. I didn’t know what he was getting at.”

  He stands in the middle of his office, his arms hanging at his sides. “I was so angry when I started to search, so ready for a fight. Somehow I blamed him—and you. I thought my whole future was gone. In the months after my fiancée’s death I thought that if you hadn’t given me up, if I hadn’t been adopted, somewhere I would have been spared the pain.” He laughs huskily, adjusts his glasses. “Anyway, when I began to search, I never thought I’d find such an old man. Or someone in such a feeble state in a state hospital. I never imagined any of it.”

  I look away, but I’m listening.

  “After he gave all his money to SAB, they moved him to a state hospital, and it was a pit. He wasn’t well cared for. They didn’t even change his bedclothes for days,” he says. “Anyway, I moved him to a nice place. I could do that for him.”

  “Wait.” I hold the top letter up. “Why did he give his money to SAB—if he felt like this?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but I could guess. He was a complicated man.” Kevin walks closer to me. Standing in front of me, he looks smaller, lost, like he’s just wandered into this office. “He gave his money to the archives. There is a stipulation that said it has to be used to preserve their records of the past.”

  That is something I will have to think through. What has been lost to me, he devoted himself to preserving. History is steeped in irony, and here it is. I am drowning in irony now.

  Kevin is still talking. “I had him hooked up to five different machines. And I kept him alive—I did—for a time. He stabilized. I would go after work and on holidays and the weekends. I would sit by him and listen to the machines buzz and whir and beep. I was keeping him alive. That gave me peace.”

  I’ve been standing this whole time, but now I brave the edge of a leather chair.

  “He began to have moments of lucidity. He recognized me. He wanted to talk. He told me about his ballerinas. He had saved all these old photos. He wouldn’t let me touch them, and he handled them with protective gloves of some sort. He would take them out one by one and he would school me in why each ballerina through history was so great.” He gives a little laugh.

  “Trefilova was so athletic that she could do fifty fouettés before her first coffee,” I say.

  He laughs again. “Karsavina was a great pantomime artist.”

  “Ulanova was the greatest actress of them all,” I say.

  “Markova’s powerful classical lines,” he says.

  “Taglioni—” I say.

  “The pointe shoe of course.”

  We smile, an old cripple in common.

  I am sitting, he’s standing, we’re just a few feet apart. “I just wanted to hear the stories about his life—and you. But he had to talk about his ballerinas.”

  Despite myself, I nod.

  “Gradually, I got curious. I began to go to the ballet. He couldn’t leave his bed, but I went and described what I’d seen to him and he closed his eyes and drank it in. I fed him ballet and he grew stronger.”

  I’m envious of all these words Kevin has to describe his relationship with
Maurice. I have so few. My own self when I first met Maurice—an anxious wide-eyed girl.

  Kevin’s gazing out at the gathering dark in the East. He turns back to look at me. His glasses are off again. His eyes looks smaller and deeper-set. Actually, there is a lot of Maurice in him. The small stature. And the coiled energy, an intensity of gaze, a precision of expression. The way his eyes can settle into a pinprick of attention like his father’s.

  “One day he said, ‘your mother was the greatest dancer of all’ and I said ‘who was she?’ And then he told me. He told me everything. He told me how you followed him home and stood there in his living room as if you owned him. He said he fell in love with you then. He said you were the bravest girl he knew. He said, ‘she could have been famous, but because of me she was not.’ He told me how I was conceived. By then, he was very sick, he was dying. It was very difficult for me to hear.”

  “Ha!” I shake my head.

  “He had a picture of you. He showed me. Here, I saved it for you.” He goes back to his desk and pulls a photo from his drawer and hands it to me. It’s browned around the edges, and small. Against the dim stage set of a castle, a blurry figure in yellow leaps high off the ground. An off-kilter figure in blue—a boy in a prince’s tunic—stands with arm raised like in a strange salute. It’s a strange, spooky picture, a moment in a play, not quite real. “It looks like you’re flying.”

  “I was falling,” I say. “I fractured my wrist that day.” I hold it up to show him.

  My son moves toward me. “I’m glad I sent Maurice’s letter to you. I’m glad you found me.” He’s so close I can smell him, old coffee and the sweet smell of new photocopies. “I wasn’t sure after what Maurice—my father—told me that you’d want to see me. Or how you’d react.”

  Secrets can make more secrets. My affair with Sioban, for instance. But I stopped that one. And Sioban, I remember, has reported me. No more secrets. Staring at this young man behind his enormous desk who was trying to stop the secrets by sending me the letter. A sneaky, imperfect way, I know.