I was thinking about this one day when I was on the back veranda, and Carrie was planting pansies she’d grown from seed, and beside her were little pots with tiny petunia settings. Chris came out from the house and tossed me the evening newspaper. “There’s an article in there that might be of some interest to you,” he said in an off-hand way. “I thought about not showing it to you, but then I decided I should.”
The husband and wife ballet team of Julian Marquet and Catherine Dahl, our own local celebrities, seems to have parted company. For the first time Julian Marquet will partner a ballerina other than his wife in a major television production of Giselle. It has been rumored about that Miss Dahl is ill, and also rumored that the ballet team are about to split.
There was more to read, including the fact that Yolanda Lange was to replace me! This was our big chance—another of many, to make stars of ourselves, and he was putting Yolanda in my part! Damn him! Why didn’t he grow up? Every chance we had he blew it. He couldn’t lift Yolanda easily, not with his bad back.
Chris threw me a strange look before he asked, “What are you going to do about it?” I yelled back, “Nothing!” For a second or two he didn’t say anything.
“Cathy, he didn’t want you to come to my graduation, did he? And that’s why he’s put Yolanda in your role. I warned you not to let him be your manager. Madame Zolta would have treated you more fairly.”
I got up to pace the porch. Our original contract with Madame Z. had expired two years ago, and all we owed her now was twelve performances a year. The rest of the time Julian and I were freelance, and could dance with whatever company we chose.
Let Julian have Yolanda. Let him make a fool of himself—I hoped to God he dropped her! Let him have all his teenybopper playmates for sex games . . . I didn’t care. Then I was running in the house and up to my bedroom where I flung myself face down and bawled.
Everything was made worse by the fact that I had made a secret trip to the gynecologist the day before. Two missed periods didn’t really mean anything for a woman like me, who was so irregular. I might not be pregnant; it might be just another false alarm . . . and if it wasn’t, I prayed I’d have the strength to go through with an abortion! I didn’t need a baby in my life. I knew once I had a child, he or she would become the center of my world, and luv would again spoil a ballerina who could have been the best.
Ballet music was in my head when I drove Chris’s car to visit Madame Marisha one hot spring day when all the world seemed sleepy and lazy except for those idiot children being instructed by a shrill little bat wearing black, as always. I sat in the shadows near the far wall of a huge auditorium and watched the large class of boys and girls dance. It was scary to think of how soon those girls would grow up to replace the stars of the present. Then I too would become another Madame Marisha and the years would flow like seconds, until I was Madame Zolta, and all my beauty would be preserved only in old, faded photographs.
“Catherine!” called Madame M. joyfully when she spied me. She came striding swiftly, gracefully my way. “Why do you sit in shadows?” she asked. “How nice to see your lovely face again. And don’t think I don’t know why you look so sad! You’re one big fool to leave Julian! He’s a big baby; you know he can’t be left alone or he does things to hurt himself, and when he hurts himself, he hurts you too! Why did you let him get control of management? Why did you let him burn up your money as fast as it hits your pockets? I tell you this, in your place, I would never, never have let him put another in my role of Giselle!”
God, what a blabbermouth he was!
“Don’t worry about me, Madame,” I said coolly, “if my husband doesn’t want me for his partner anymore, I’m sure there will be others who will.”
She scowled, advanced. She put those bony hands on me and shook me as if to wake me up. Up close, I could see she’d aged terribly since Georges had died. Her ebony hair was almost white now, and streaked with charcoal. She snarled then, baring teeth whiter than they used to be and far more perfect. “You gonna let my son make a fool of you? You let him put another dancer in your place? I gave you credit for having more backbone! Now you hightail it back to New York and push that Yolanda out of his life! Marriage is sacred, and wedding vows are meant to be kept!”
Then she softened and said, “Come now, Catherine,” and led me into her small cluttered office. “Now you tell me about this foolishness going on between you and your husband!”
“It is really none of your business!”
She swung another straight chair to where she could straddle it. Leaning forward upon her arms, she stabbed me with her hard penetrating glare. “Anything, and everything concerning my son is my business!” she snapped. “Now you just sit there and keep quiet, and let me tell you what you don’t know about your husband.” Her voice turned a little kinder. “I was older than Georges when we were married, and even so I dared putting off having a child until I believed the best of my career was behind me, and then I became pregnant. Georges never wanted a child to hold him down, and back, and so, from the beginning Julian had two strikes against him.
“I tell myself we didn’t force the dance upon our son, but we did keep him with us, so the ballet became part of his world, the most important part.” She sighed heavily and wiped a bony hand over her troubled brow. “We were strict with him, I admit that. We did everything we could to make him what was perfect in our eyes, but the more we tried, the more determined he became to be everything we didn’t want him to be. We tried to teach him perfect diction, so he ended up mocking us with all kinds of vulgar street language—gutter talk, Georges called it. You know,” she went on with a wistful expression, “only after my husband was dead and buried did I realize that he never spoke to our son unless it was an order not to do something, or an order to improve his dancing technique. I never realized that Georges could have been jealous of his own son, seeing that he was a better dancer and would achieve more fame. It wasn’t easy for me to become only a ballet mistress, and for Georges to be only an instructor. Many a night we lay on our bed and held to each other, craving the applause, the adulation. . . . It was a hunger that would not be satisfied until we heard the applause for our son.”
Again she paused, and birdlike craned her neck to peer at me and see if I was paying full attention. Oh, yes, she had my attention. She was telling me so much I needed to know.
“Julian tried to hurt Georges and Georges got hurt because Julian made light of his father’s reputation. One day he called him only a second-class performer. Georges didn’t speak to his own son for a whole month! They never got back together after that. Farther and farther they drifted apart . . . until one fine Christmas Day when another prodigy drifted into our lives, and offered herself. You! Julian had flown back to visit us, only because I had pleaded with him to try and make it up with his father . . . and Julian saw you.
“It is our responsibility to pass along our skills of technique to the younger generation, and still I felt some apprehension in taking you on, mostly because I thought you would hurt my son. I don’t know why I thought that, but it seemed obvious from the very start, it was that older doctor you loved. Then I thought you had something very rare, a passion for the dance that is seldom seen. You were, in your own way, equal to what Julian was, and the two of you together were so sensational I couldn’t believe my eyes. My son felt it too, the rapport between you two. You turned those big, soft, admiring blue eyes on him, so later he came and told me you were a sex kitten who would fall easily under his spell and into his arms. He and I always had a close relationship, and he confessed to me what other boys would have kept secret.”
She paused, flicked her stony eyes over me and went on breathlessly, “You came, you admired him, you loved him when you were dancing with him, and when you weren’t, you were indifferent. The harder you were to win, the more determined he was to have you. I thought you clever, playing a skillful woman’s game when you were only a child! And now you, you . . . you go
and leave him when he was in a foreign country, when he couldn’t speak the language, when you should have learned he has weaknesses, many of them, and that he cannot bear to be alone!”
She jumped up like a black, scrawny alleycat and stood above me. “Without Julian to give you inspiration and enhance your talent with his own, where would you be? Without him would you be in New York, dancing with what is fast becoming one of the leading ballet companies? No! You’d be here, raising babies for that doctor. God knows why you said yes to Julian, and how you can keep from loving him. For he tells me you don’t, and never have! So you drug him. You leave him. You take off to see your brother become a doctor, when you know damn well your place is at your husband’s side, making him happy and taking care of his wants!
“Yes! Yes!” she shrilled, “he called me long distance and told me everything! Now he thinks he hates you! Now he wants to cut you off. And when he does, he won’t have a heart left to keep him alive! For he gave you his heart years and years ago!”
Slowly I rose to my feet; my legs felt weak and trembly. I brushed a hand over my aching forehead, and held back tired tears. All of a sudden it hit me hard, I did love Julian! Now I saw how very much we were alike, him with his hate for his father who had denied him as a son. And me with my hatred for my mother, making me do crazy things, like sending off hateful letters and Christmas cards to sadden her life and never, never let her find peace. Julian in competition with his father, never knowing he’d won, and was better . . . and me in competition with my mother—but I had yet to prove myself better. “Madame, I am going to tell you something Julian might not know, and I didn’t really know until today; I do love your son. Perhaps I always loved him, and just couldn’t accept it.”
She shook her head, then fired her words like bullets. “If you love him, why did you leave him? Answer me that! You left him because you found out he has a liking for young girls? Fool! All men have yearnings for young girls—but still they go on loving their wives! If you let his desire for young flesh drive you away, you are crazy! Slap his face; kick his behind—tell him to leave those girls alone or you will divorce him! Say all of that, and he will be what you want. But when you say nothing, and act like you don’t care, you tell him plainly you don’t love him, or want him, or need him!”
“I’m not his mother, or a priest, or God,” I said wearily, sick of all the passion she used. Backing toward the door, I tried to leave. “I don’t know if I can keep Julian from young girls, but I’m willing to go back and try. I promise to do better. I’ll be more understanding, and I’ll let him know I love him so much, I can’t abide the thought of him making love to anyone but me.”
She came to take me in her arms. She soothed, “Poor baby, if I have been hard on you, it was for your own good. You have to keep my son from destroying himself. When you save him, you save yourself, for I lied when I said you would be nothing without Julian. He is the one who would be nothing without you! He has a death wish, always I’ve known it. He thinks he’s not good enough to live on because his father could never convince him he was, and that was my fault too, as well as Georges’s. Julian waited for years and years for his father to see him as a son, worthy of being loved for himself. He waited equally as long for Georges to say yes, you will be even a better dancer than I was, and I’m proud of what and who you are. But Georges kept his silence. But you go back and tell Julian Georges did love him. To me he said it many times. Tell him too that his father was proud of him. Tell him, Catherine. Go back and convince him of how much you need and love him. Tell him how sorry you are to have left him alone. Go quickly before he does something terrible to himself!”
* * *
It was time to say good-bye to Carrie, Paul and Henny again. Only this time I didn’t have to bid adieu to Chris. He put his foot down. “No! I’m coming with you! I’m not letting you go back to a crazy man. When you’ve made your peace with him, and I know everything is all right—only then will I leave.”
Carrie cried, as she always did, and Paul stood back and let only his eyes speak and say yes, I could find a place in his heart again.
I looked down as the plane began to lift, and saw Paul holding Carrie’s small hand, as she tilted her face to stare up at us and waved, and waved until we could see her no more. I squirmed into a comfortable position and put my head on Chris’s shoulder, and told him to wake me when we reached New York. “A fine traveling companion you make,” he grumbled, but soon his cheek was on my hair as he dozed off too. “Chris,” I said sleepily, “remember that book about Raymond and Lily who were always seeking the magical place where purple grass grew that would fulfill all their wishes? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to look down and see purple grass?”
“Yeah,” he said as sleepily as I. “I keep looking for it too.”
* * *
The plane set down at La Guardia around three. A hot, sultry day. The sun played coy, darting in and out of gathering storm clouds. We were both tired. “At this hour Julian will be in the theater rehearsing. They’ll use the rehearsals as a promotion film. There have to be a lot of rehearsals; we’ve never danced in this theater before and it’s important to get the feel of the space you have to move in.”
Chris was lugging along my two heavy suitcases, while I carried his much lighter bag. I laughed and smiled his way, glad he was with me, though Julian would be furious. “Now you stay in the background . . . and don’t let him even see you if everything goes all right. Really, Chris, I’m sure he’ll be glad to see me. He’s not dangerous.”
“Sure,” he said glumly.
We sauntered on into the darkened theater. The stage up ahead was very brightly lit. The TV cameras were in position, ready to shoot the warm-ups. The director, producer and a few others were lined up in the front-row seats.
The heat of the day was chased by the chill of the huge space. Chris opened up one of my bags and spread a sweater about my shoulders after we both sat down near the aisle, midway back in the center section. Automatically I lifted both my legs to stretch them on top of the seat just ahead. Though I shivered, the corps de ballet were sweating from the hot klieg lights. The eye was down and a few flats were up. I looked for Julian but didn’t see him.
Just to think of Julian was to bring him out of the wings, onto the stage in a series of whirling jetés. Oh, he looked terrific in that snug, white leotard with bright green leg warmers.
“Wow!” whispered Chris in my ear. “Sometimes I forget how sensational he is on stage. No wonder every ballet critic thinks he will be the star of this decade when he learns some discipline. Let it be soon . . . and I mean you too, Cathy.” I smiled, for I too needed discipline. “Yes,” I said, “I too, of course.”
No sooner had Julian finished his solo performance than Yolanda Lange pirouetted out from the wings, wearing red. She was more beautiful than ever! She danced extraordinarily well for a girl so tall. That was, she danced well until Julian came to partner her, and then everything went wrong. He reached for her waist and got her buttocks, then he had to quickly shift his hold, so she slipped and nearly fell and again he adjusted to save her. A male dancer who let a ballerina fall would soon never have a partner to lift. They tried again the same jump, lift, and fall back, and this time it went almost as awkwardly, making Yolanda seem ungainly, and Julian unskilled.
Even I, sitting halfway down the row of seats, could hear her loud curse. “Damn you!” she screeched. “You make me look gauche—if you let me fall, I’ll see you never dance again!”
“Cut!” called the director, getting to his feet and looking impatiently from one to the other.
The corps de ballet milled about, grumbling, throwing angry looks at the pair center stage that was wasting so much time. Obviously, from the sweaty, hot looks of all of them, this had been going on for some time, and badly. “Marquet!” called the director, well known for having little patience for those who required two, or even more takes. “What the hell is wrong with your timing? I thought you said you kn
ew this ballet. I can’t think of one thing you’ve done right in the past three days.”
“Me?” Julian railed back. “It’s not me . . . it’s her—she jumps too soon!”
“Okay,” the director said sarcastically, “it’s always her fault and never yours.” He tried to control his impatience, knowing Julian would walk out in a second if criticized too much. “When is your wife going to be well enough to dance again?”
Yolanda screamed out, “Hey, wait a minute! I came all the way from Los Angeles and now you’re sounding as if you’re going to replace me with Catherine! I won’t have it! I’m written into that contract now! I’ll sue!”
“Miss Lange,” said the director smoothly, “you are the cover only—but while you are, let’s attempt it again. Marquet, listen for your cue—Lange, make ready—and pray to God this time it will be fit to show an audience who might expect better from professionals.”
I smiled to hear she was only the cover; I had thought I was really written out.
I perversely enjoyed watching Julian make a fool out of himself and Yolanda as well. Yet, when the dancers on stage groaned, I groaned along with them, feeling their exhaustion, and despite myself I began to feel pity for Julian who was diligently trying to balance Yolanda. Any second the director could call “take ten” and that’s when I would make my move.
Up ahead, first row, Madame Zolta suddenly turned her wizened giraffe neck to crane my way, and those sharp little beady eyes saw me sitting tensely, watching like an eagle. “Hey, you, Catherine,” she called with great enthusiasm. Come, she gestured, sit by my side.
The Flowers in the Attic Series: The Dollangangers: Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and a New Excerpt! Page 66