The Night Travellers

3. Mary's Tape

3 Mary's Tape When I was dancing, then I was happy. When I first began studying with Madame Delida, I would hold my hands up, arms curved ("so to frame the face," she said). I lowered my eyes, but couldn't see my feet past the tutu. During practice I could see them, see how the ankles swelled forward, out of the natural line. How slow and painful to master, making this way of moving seem a part of me. I didn't take it badly that I was a little shorter than required for ballet. There was always modern dance. It's more like nature, I would tell myself, thinking I might like it best. But even as a departing world, ballet always sparkled, a fairyland, something to love. In Kingsbury, after Madame Delida left and Poppy died, Mother had to work to send me to the ballet school, the one Al Bernstein had. Then she believed Jeff Blaise wasgone, so she came and gathered me up one day and off we went to Philadelphia, floating on promises of how I must "go on with it," she was not against it anymore. "It" for her was just dancing; she couldn't make finer distinctions. They both said I had to finish school. They packed me straight into Bryn Mawr. It was the end of the winter term, during the holidays and too late to register for spring, but Fred Davis had pull. He was Main Line, which meant he knew how to work things. And there was Mother, like she always was, north or south, stipulating . "I won't agree unless we have this straight." "All right," Fred answers. "Let's sit down and see if we understand each other." It could make you think he was nothing but a yes man, but then 134 Voices from Afar 135 I began to see him better. He was just getting what he didn't want to think about out of the way. Fred was so sharp he could afford to look unconcerned. He had inherited everything and took care of it. He liked collections. He had put Mother among his collections. She came under the head of WOMEN . . . subdivision, WIVES. Nobody mentioned Jeff. "Bryn Mawr," Mother said. "All right," I answered. "A ballet school downtown, the best/' she said. "All right." "With permission to practice between lessons at the college." "All right." What else? Living in the dormitory. Out of their way, I realized. Fred hadn't collected me. Who would want this careless-looking girl straying around his panelled house with the separate library, highbacked chairs at the dining table, and glass cabinets full of old carved ivories? Imagine dusting all that. He caught me upstairs in a third floor retreat, trying actually to play with some last-century games made of carved wood with agate marbles that went spinning around in little curved troughs. "Nobody's played with those things in forty years," he said. He readily admitted he had thought he'd heard a rat up there, so came up to check. He played with me, though, for a few minutes. I liked him. "She's got to work, hasn't she?" he confided in me, talking about Mother. Her bid to continue cancer research at the University of Pennsylvania never materialized. They kept putting her off. She blamed it, I knew, on the bad record of the lab in Kingsbury and still suspected Jeff (I knew that, too), so was making it my fault in some silent way. I couldn't help it. She couldn't help it that looking beautiful in Fred's beautiful house was not enough. It was too little for her energies. "Sit and knit?" she would burst out. "Never!" So Fred, who had inherited, among other things, that little pharmaceutical line that had led him to Atlanta in the first place to find Kate floating down the escalator, got her a job in one of them. Cold creams, astringents, cleansers, and such. They had to be tested. Funny, but it all came originally from tar. Tar came from coal. She got to wear her white jackets again. For all I knew, there were once again those helpless little live creatures to pick up in her capable hands, sensuous, that squirming they did in a human grasp, those frightened helpless eyes and wiggling noses. Pink, probably. Testing them. Putting them down. She likes that. [18.220.150.237] Project MUSE (2024...