The Four Temperaments

by Yona Zeldis McDonough

  At night, after the performances, they went out to eat, just the two of them or occasionally with some of the other dancers. Sometimes Ginny thought she could detect a wistful look in Althea's eyes when the dancers were dissecting some aspect or other of that evening's performance. But mostly Althea maintained what Ginny privately thought of as a kind of regal detachment: poised, lovely and interested in the conversation, yet a little aloof from it as well. With her arms draped casually across the table and one of her signature chiffon scarves around her throat or shoulders, it seemed that she was beyond feeling, beyond pain, and Ginny admired her for it.

  In the middle of the company's stay in Saratoga, the Federal Express truck that brought all the boxes of pointe shoes arrived. This was a big deal because the shipment—it usually came once a month—was late, and lots of the dancers thought they would have to scour the dance-supply stores around town to find shoes in a hurry. Finding ones that fit wasn't easy, and the local Capezio or Selva didn't have the best selection—or the necessary quantities. Dancers went through lots of shoes during a season, at least twelve pairs a week. The ballet company ordered them in bulk from England, where little old men (Ginny thought of Pinocchio's father, Gepetto) sat at their workbenches. Each girl had a “maker” whose mark—a tiny x or y or p—appeared on the bottom of the shoe, like a brand. “Know thy maker” was a joke the dancers liked to repeat to each other and, in fact, they all did know their makers, very well. Store-bought shoes just couldn't compare.

  When the custom-made shoes had finally arrived, praise and hosannas poured out from all the dancers who worried that they wouldn't get there in time. Althea had the job of sorting and distributing them. Ginny grabbed hers. Time to break them in.

  First she tested the toes: if they felt too soft, she brushed them with shellac or clear nail polish to make them harder. But if they were too hard, which did happen with certain batches, she soaked the toes in water or rubbing alcohol; otherwise, they would make her bleed. Next, she had to snip out the satin toe and roughen the leather on the bottom—she used sandpaper—to make the soles of the shoes less slippery. She also needed to yank out the cotton insole, which was as bulky as a sanitary napkin. Then she sewed on the ribbons and elastic. Each girl had her own way of doing this, a private ritual that she believed would bring her luck onstage; Ginny used dental floss in place of thread for hers. But there was still more: she had to step on the toes to flatten them, and bend the shank, to make it flexible. Then she smacked the shoes against the wall a few times, because otherwise they were just too damn noisy. No one wanted to hear a ballerina clomping like a horse onstage—it killed the illusion of weightlessness and grace that she had spent her whole professional life trying to perfect. After that, Ginny could finally put the shoes on, for all of fifteen or twenty minutes, the time that it took to dance a single ballet. Then they were finished and would be tossed out, unless there was some sentimental reason to keep them.

  Ginny still had her first pair. The blood inside had seeped through and turned the toes a dull shade of brown, but that was part of their appeal. And before she left New York, Ginny gave Gabriel the pair she had worn the night he watched her dance. Ginny was a little worried about his having them—that wife of his sounded positively cuckoo—but hopefully, he'd be careful and put them somewhere out of harm's way. He had told Ginny about how she had cut up all the books and magazines. Poor Gabriel. She wondered—but only for a second—what sort of wife she herself would have been. Then the thought passed. Ginny knew that she didn't want to be a wife—not even Gabriel's wife—for a long time. Maybe never.

  Since Ginny had started sharing a room with Althea, they became even more friendly. Over dinner in the one southern-style restaurant in town, Althea confided how hard it had been to be a black girl in the resolutely white world of ballet.

  “No matter how high my arabesques were, I was never going to look right,” she said. “There was this line of white bread girls with their white bread skin and white bread hair. And then there was me. I always stuck out.”

  “Or stood out,” Ginny said. “Mr. B. must have thought that.”

  “He did,” Althea said, and she smiled, remembering.

  “But I know what you mean about sticking out. I did too.”

  “You? Weren't you a star even back in Louisiana?”

  “In ballet class. Not anywhere else.”

  “So we were both misfits,” Althea said. She had ordered coconut cake for dessert, though both she and Ginny agreed that it was a poor imitation of the cakes they were used to back home, in the South. “The kind my grandmother made had coconut flakes as long as your nail,” Althea said, frowning at the tiny, minced bits topping the piece she was eating.

  Althea also told Ginny how much she had hated New York when she first got there. Ginny could certainly relate to that. “I still hate New York,” she said.

  “Give it time,” Althea advised. She ate the last bit of her cake and put down her fork.

  “Do I have a choice?” Ginny asked.

  One night, Althea didn't come back to the room at all. Ginny was curious, but since Althea didn't volunteer any information the next morning, it seemed nosy to ask. All she said was, “Everyone has a right to a private life. Even the ballet mistress.” Ginny said “Amen,” and Althea laughed.

  “How about you?” Althea then asked, looking at Ginny carefully as if she had missed something. “What about your private life?”

  “Let's just keep it private, okay?” Ginny answered. She was fixing her hair for class and Althea gave her ponytail a yank, but that was all.

  After Saratoga, the ballet company returned to New York. They had a few days off before they were scheduled to fly to San Francisco, and some of the dancers went to the beach at East Hampton or Fire Island. Not Ginny. She had things to do. First there was the packing. All those clothes she had bought in Saratoga were coming with her. Instead of stuffing everything into the suitcase and sitting on it to make it close, Ginny folded things neatly, even pausing to put tissue paper in the sleeves of the jacket and the toes of the shoes. Rita would have liked that.

  Once the packing was completed, Ginny took a walk down Broadway, where she decided, on impulse, to have her nails and toes done. Not that she usually paid attention to things like that, but Althea and her mud wraps had started her thinking. Ginny picked bright red polish for her toes and clear for her fingernails—she knew that Erik didn't allow red fingernails onstage. As the young, pretty Korean woman filed and painted, she watched the other women who were getting their hair cut and styled. Dancers always wore their hair long, so that they could put it up into a bun. But it did occur to her that she could have the ends trimmed with something other than the same pair of tiny scissors she used for sewing the ribbons on her pointe shoes.

  The black-clad man with the crew cut and the earring who was blow-drying the hair of another customer must have read her mind because he asked, “How about a trim? If you wait until your nails dry, I'll have some time then.”

  “All right,” Ginny said, and then surprised herself by adding, “What about the color? Can you do something about that?”

  “Maybe some blond highlights? That would really bring out your eyes.”

  “Blond,” Ginny repeated. “Sounds good to me.” She waited until her nails were dry, and then moved over to the other chair, the one by the sink.

  “Winter Wheat,” the hairdresser was saying, looking at a row of bottles on a shelf. “Or maybe Golden Autumn.” In the end, he trimmed about two inches off the bottom and didn't do the highlights after all. Instead, he dyed her whole head blond.

  All this took quite a while; first her hair had to be washed, cut and combed out. There was a nasty-smelling shade of dye used on her entire head. This was followed by crimped foil packets applied to carefully selected strands of hair; the packets contained still another nasty-smelling shade, another permutation of blond. “So it will look natural,” explained the stylist. “Not like you dipped your
head into a vat of peroxide.”

  Ginny decided she liked him. While she waited for the various colors to take, the stylist offered her a batch of fashion magazines, but Ginny shook her head.

  “How about a latte, then?” he asked. Ginny happily accepted the coffee and the hazelnut biscotti that he offered.

  “So you're a ballerina,” said the stylist, whose name turned out to be Craig, as he sat down next to her.

  “Right.” She blew on the coffee to cool it.

  “Where do you dance?”

  “Lincoln Center. New York City Ballet.”

  “Wow,” he said. “City Ballet.” A wistful look crossed his face. “I love the ballet.”

  “You do?”

  “I even wanted to be a dancer,” he confided.

  “Did you ever take lessons?” Ginny asked, and not just out of politeness.

  “My parents wouldn't let me. Thought it would make me a sissy. So I fooled them and became a hairdresser instead!” He laughed and Ginny joined in.

  “You'll have to come see me dance,” she offered. “I'll make sure you get comp tickets.”

  “Really?” Craig asked. “That would be great.”

  After the color had taken, someone else washed Ginny's hair and then Craig set to work combing and styling it. The color they had finally settled on was called Honey Kissed Blonde; the highlights, Midnight Sun.

  “Are you dancing tonight?” Craig asked. His hands fluttered gracefully as small birds around her face. “Because when you do, you're going to knock 'em dead!” He called two other stylists over to see his handiwork and they exclaimed over her transformation. Ginny turned her head this way and that, to get a better view in the mirror. Her hair glowed like a sunset. Blond. Why had she never thought of it before? She and Craig exchanged phone numbers before she gave him a hug and a big tip. Then she ambled out onto Broadway again.

  She could see how people—men—were suddenly checking her out as she passed. She stopped in front of a drugstore that had a mirror in the window, and rummaged through her bag for a red lipstick, the kind she usually saved for the stage. She couldn't believe the effect. Wait until Gabriel saw it.

  She went inside the drugstore and bought a pair of dark sunglasses. Then she went back outside, checked the mirror again. She liked what she saw. Not even caring who might hear her, she addressed her reflection. “California, here I come!”

  RUTH

  When Ruth packed for the trip to New Hampshire, she brought along all the novels of Jane Austen, which she had not looked at since she was a girl. She no longer had the books from all those years ago—her mother was not a keeper—but she found almost all of them in trim Penguin paperback editions at the local Barnes & Noble. The only one she couldn't find, Northanger Abbey, was available at the library. When she arrived at the cottage, Ruth unpacked the books first thing and set them in a neat pile on a table right by the flowered wicker sofa on the wraparound porch. It was there that she sat every day with one book or another in her lap. Now and then, she looked up from the book to the lake, mostly to register the changes that light, air and clouds had wrought across its surface. She cooked some, but only casually, and listened to Oscar's practicing, which seemed to her more haunting, more nuanced than anything she had heard him play in recent memory. One day, they drove to Portsmouth; another, to Kittery. It seemed to Ruth that Oscar was more solicitous, more tender than usual. As if he were still trying to repent.

  The mostly pleasant rhythm of their days was abruptly shattered shortly before they were scheduled to go back to New York, when Oscar put the piece of paper—the one about the ballet company traveling to San Francisco—into Ruth's hands.

  “She'll be there. And he'll be there,” he said.

  “Maybe he doesn't even know the company is in town,” Ruth said. “He told me he was finished with her.”

  “That's not what she told me,” Oscar said. “And even if she had, I'd think she was lying.”

  “You talked to her?”

  “I asked her to stay away from him.”

  “And . . .?”

  “And she told me she wouldn't. Or couldn't.”

  “Couldn't?” Ruth repeated. “Doesn't she understand the trouble she'll cause? Doesn't she care?” Ruth handed the paper back to Oscar. “Maybe we should go to San Francisco. Right away. Leave the cottage early, book a flight—”

  “What for?” Oscar said. “Even if they're together in some motel room, what can we do about it? Storm in and tell Gabriel to put on his clothes and go home? Tell Penelope not to mind?” He put his head in his hands and was silent. Then he said, “It's out of our control now, Ruth.”

  So they didn't pack up and go anywhere, at least not until the end of the week. But the rest of the time felt ruined beyond repair. It rained heavily for two days; the weather turned cool and they stayed indoors, watching the needles of water that poured down onto the roiled surface of the lake. Oscar tried to make a fire, but the chimney was stopped up. The smoke that filled the rooms was so bad that they had to go outside and sit in the car, feeling cranky and exiled.

  When the rain finally ended, Ruth and Oscar decided to drive north, toward Concord. On the way they stopped for lunch, but on the trip back, Oscar felt sick and had to get out of the car to throw up. Ruth was grateful when it came time to pack up and leave New Hampshire.

  Back in New York, the weather was steamy, but Ruth didn't mind. She took her time unpacking. At the hospital, she held the babies in her arms and thought of her granddaughters, Isobel and Hannah, both far away at the moment. The residents at the nursing home were, for the most part, glad to see her. Ruth noticed that Mrs. Vogel was no longer there; one of the nurses reported that she had died earlier in the month. The room's new resident, Mr. Plotkin, asked if Ruth could get him copies of Playboy or, better still, Penthouse. Old ones, new ones—he didn't care.

  Through all of this, Ruth felt as though she were waiting for something to happen. And she was not wrong. Around 4:00 one morning, when Oscar was sound asleep and she had gotten up to go to the bathroom, the phone rang. She stared at it before answering, because she knew, she just knew, that she was about to hear something awful.

  “Ruth? Is that the phone?” Oscar called sleepily. She picked up the receiver cautiously. At first, she heard what sounded like static. Then she realized that it was crying.

  “Mom?” said Gabriel after a moment. “Mom, I think you and Dad should fly out here right away.”

  GABRIEL

  At first, Gabriel didn't recognize Ginny. He looked from her name in the program to the stage and back again several times. Then he realized it was the hair, which at first he took to be a trick of the light or maybe a wig. But then he looked through the opera glasses he had recently purchased and saw that the hair was real, and that it had been dyed. He loved it. Not that he had any particular attraction to blondes; in fact, he had always been drawn to women with dark hair, like Penelope. But this was so in keeping with the electric nature of Ginny's soul that he couldn't believe she hadn't always been blond. Gabriel stared at the stage. When her variation ended and she skittered into the wings, he felt as though a light had been extinguished. He looked down at the program again, searching for her name again. He didn't recognize the ballet—it was something new, by a Scandinavian choreographer—and he didn't much like it. But when Ginny was dancing, there wasn't anything he wouldn't watch.

  It hadn't been hard coming here at all. Penelope actually laid out his clothes for him, solicitously brushing lint from the shoulders of the jacket. The only vaguely unsettling note came when she was standing at the door with Isobel riding on her hip. “Maybe you'll find the dancer whose pointe shoes you have. Like Cinderella,” she said lightly, but the remark made Gabriel's stomach clench with anxiety. What a shit he was. In a way, he hated himself for going to the ballet tonight, but he knew he was going anyway. Hating himself was part of the price for his connection to Ginny. He was willing to pay it.

  “I doubt it. Whoever that
was is long retired by now. She probably has three kids, an SUV and a house in the suburbs.” She laughed. The tense moment passed and he gave her a quick kiss good-bye. Then he took the elevator down, got into his car and drove—easily, swiftly—to the San Francisco Opera House. He had actually bought Penelope a ticket, in case she changed her mind at the last minute. Not that she would. But Gabriel thought it would look better if he seemed to want her company. She took the ticket from him and put it in her desk, with the bills.

  “Should I wait up?” Penelope asked.

  “If you want. Though Jeff and his wife will be there. I told him we might have a drink afterward.” Jeff worked in Gabriel's office and had said nothing about attending the ballet. But he wanted to buy himself a little time with Ginny. Penelope looked as if she wanted to wait up for him, though, so he added, “I'll call you and let you know, okay? You won't be able to call me. I'll have the cell phone turned off during the performance.”

  “Oh, right,” she said. Then she turned to Isobel.

  Gabriel parked his car in the underground lot beneath the theater, and then made the ascent to the opera house and to his seat. He had been here only once or twice before, but never with the excitement or the sense of expectation that he felt tonight. He sat down and placed his elbow on the armrest of the empty seat beside him; it was a tangible reminder of Penelope. He knew how careful he had to be; if she found out about Ginny, she wouldn't forgive him again. Which was why he told Ginny that he couldn't spend much time with her tonight—going to a motel was out of the question. But he planned to see her after the performance, when he could at least be with her for a little while, hold her hands, put an arm around her thin, tensile shoulders. Then tomorrow he could find a way to meet her. He knew she had a ballet class in the morning, but maybe she could meet him back at her hotel around noon. Her roommate was the ballet mistress, and Ginny said that she would be gone all day. That would work for Gabriel too, because Penelope didn't call him often at the office, and, anyway, he could forestall it by calling her first and mentioning that he was on his way out to lunch. Lunch was not likely to arouse her suspicions, since she knew he went out nearly every day.