Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (28 page)

Unexpectedly she laughed, tapping her spirit experimentally like a piano being tuned.

“There’s a lot in religion,” she said to her Russian friend, “but it has too much meaning.”

The Russian told Alabama about a priest she had known who became so aroused by the tales he had heard in the confessional that he got drunk on the Holy Sacrament. He drank so much during the week that there wasn’t any communion to give to the penitents on Sunday, who had also been drinking during the week and needed a pick-me-up. His church became known as a lousy dump that borrowed its blood of Christ from the synagogue, the girl said, and lost many customers, amongst them herself.

“I,” the girl rambled on, “used to be very religious. Once in Russia when I found my carriage was being drawn by a white horse I got out and walked three miles through the snow to the theatre and I got pneumonia. Since, I have cared less for God—between the priests and white horses.”

The Opera gave
Faust
three times during the winter, and Alabama’s tea-rose tarlatan that had risen at first like a frozen fountain wore streaked and crushed. She loved the lessons the morning after a performance—the letdown and still floral calm like the quiet of an orchard in bloom that followed the excitement, and her face’s being pale, and the traces of makeup washed out of the corner of her eyes with perspiration.

“Stations of the Cross!” moaned the girls, “but my legs ache, and I am sleepy! My mother beat me last night because I was late; my father refuses me Bel Paese—I cannot work on goat cheese!”

“Ah,” the fat mothers deflated themselves, “bellissima, my daughter——she should be ballerina, but the Americans grab everything. But Mussolini will show them, Holy Sacrament!”

For the end of Lent the Opera demanded a whole programme of ballet; Alabama at last was to dance ballerina of
Le Lac des Cygnes
.

As the ballet went into rehearsal, David wrote asking if she would like Bonnie for two weeks. Alabama got permission to miss a morning class to meet her child at the station. A swishing army officer helped Bonnie and Mademoiselle out of the train into the Neapolitan jargon of sound and color.

“Mummy,” the child cried excitedly. “Mummy!” She clung about Alabama’s knees adoringly; a soft wind swept her bangs back in little gusts. Her round face was as flushed and translucent as the polish on the day of her arrival. The bones had begun to come up in her nose; her hands were forming. She was going to have those wide-ended fingers of a Spanish primitive like David. She was very like her father.

“She has given an excellent example to the travelers,” said Mademoiselle straightening her hair.

Bonnie clung to her mother, bristling with resentment of Mademoiselle’s proprietary air. She was seven, had just begun to sense her position in the world, and was full of the critical childish reserves that accompany the first formations of social judgment.

“Is your car outside?” she bubbled.

“I haven’t any car, dear. There’s a flea-bitten horse cab that’s much nicer to take us to my pension.”

A determination not to manifest her disappointment showed in Bonnie’s face.

“Daddy has a car,” she said critically.

“Well, here we travel in chariots.” Alabama deposited her on the crinkled linen covers of the voiture.

“You and Daddy are very ‘chic,’ ” Bonnie went on speculatively. “You should have a car——”

“Mademoiselle, did you tell her that?”

“Certainly, Madame. I should like to be in Mademoiselle Bonnie’s place,” said Mademoiselle emphatically.

“I suppose I shall be very rich,” said Bonnie.

“My God, no! You must get things like that out of your head. You will have to work to get what you want—that’s why I wanted you to dance. I was sorry to hear you had given it up.”

“I did not like dancing, except the presents. At the end Madame gave me a little silver evening bag. Inside there was a glass and a comb and real powder—that part I liked. Would you like to see it?”

From a small valise she produced an incomplete pack of cards, several frayed paper dolls, an empty matchbox, a small bottle, two souvenir fans, and a notebook.

“I used to make you keep your things in better order,” commented Alabama, staring at the untidy mess.

Bonnie laughed. “I do more as I please now,” she said. “Here is the bag.”

Handling the little silver envelope, an unexpected lump rose to Alabama’s throat. A faint scent of eau de cologne brought back the glitter on the crystal beads of Madame; the music hammering the afternoon to a beaten-silver platter, David and Bonnie waiting at dinner, swirled in her head like snowflakes settling in a glass paperweight.

“It’s very pretty,” she said.

“Why do you cry? I will let you carry it sometime.”

“It’s the smell makes my eyes water. What have you got in your suitcase that smells so?”

“But, Madame,” expostulated Mademoiselle, “it is the very same mixture they make for the Prince of Wales. One takes one part lemon, one part eau de cologne, one part Coty’s jasmine, and——”

Alabama laughed. “——And you shake it up, and pour off two parts ether and half a dead cat!”

Bonnie’s eyes widened disdainfully.

“You can take it in trains for when your hands are soiled,” she protested, “or for if you have the ‘vertige.’ ”

“I see—or in case the engine runs out of oil. Here’s where we get out.”

The cab shook itself to an indeterminate stop before the pink boardinghouse. Bonnie’s eyes wandered incredulously over the flaking wash and the hollow entry. The doorway smelled of damp and urine; stone steps cradled the centuries in their worn centers.

“Madame has not make a mistake?” protested Mademoiselle querulously.

“No,” Alabama said cheerfully. “You and Bonnie have a room to yourselves. Don’t you
love
Naples?”

“I hate Italy,” pronounced Bonnie. “I like it better in France.”

“How do you know? You’ve just got here.”

“The Italians are very dirty, isn’t it?” Mademoiselle reluctantly parted with an unclassifiable facial expression.

“Ah,” said the landlady, smothering Bonnie in a vast convex embrace. “Mother of God, it is a beautiful child!” Her breasts hung over the stunned little girl like sandbags.

“Dieu!” Mademoiselle sighed. “These Italians are a religious people!”

The Easter table was decorated with lugubrious crosses made of dried palmetto leaves. There was gnocchi and vino da Capri for dinner, and a purple card with cupids pasted in the centre of gold radiations resembling medals of state. In the afternoon they walked along the pulverized white roads and up the steep alleys gashed with bright rags hung out to dry in the glare. Bonnie waited in her mother’s room while Alabama prepared for rehearsal. The child amused herself by sketching in the rocker.

“I cannot make a good likeness,” she announced, “so I have changed to caricature. It is Daddy when he was a young man.”

“Your father’s only thirty-two,” said Alabama.

“Well, that’s quite old, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not so old as seven, my dear.”

“Oh, of course—if you count backwards,” agreed Bonnie.

“And if you begin in the middle, we are a very young family all round.”

“I should like to begin when I am twenty, and have six children.”

“How many husbands?”

“Oh, no husbands. They shall, perhaps, be away at the time,” said Bonnie vaguely. “I have seen them so in the movies.”

“What was that remarkable film?”

“It was about dancing, so Daddy took me. There was a lady in the Russian Ballet. She had no children but a man and they both cried a lot.”

“It must have been interesting.”

“Yes. It was Gabrielle Gibbs. Do you like her, Mummy?”

“I’ve never seen her except in life, so I couldn’t say.”

“She is my favorite actress. She is a very pretty lady.”

“I must see the picture.”

“We could go if we were in Paris. I could carry my silver sac de soirée.”

Every day during rehearsals, Bonnie sat in the cold theatre with Mademoiselle, lost under the dim trimmings like rose and gold cigar bands, terrified by the seriousness and the emptiness and Madame Sirgeva. Alabama went over and over the adagio.

“Blue devils,” gasped the
maîtresse
. “Nobody has done that with two turns! Ma chére Alabama—you will see with the orchestra that it cannot be!”

On their way home they passed a man ponderously swallowing frogs. The frogs’ legs were tied to a string, and he pulled them up again out of his stomach, as many as four at a time. Bonnie gloated with disgusted delight. It made her quite sick to see; she was fascinated.

The pasty food at the boardinghouse gave Bonnie a rash.

“It is ringworm from the filth,” said Mademoiselle. “If we stay, Madame, it may turn to erysipelas,” she threatened. “Besides, Madame, our bath is dirty!”

“It is quite like broth, mutton broth,” corroborated Bonnie distastefully, “only without the peas!”

“I had wanted to give Bonnie a party,” said Alabama.

“Could Madame suggest where I might get a thermometer?” Mademoiselle interjected hastily.

Nadjya, the Russian, unearthed a little boy for Bonnie’s party. Madame Sirgeva incalculably furnished a nephew. Though all of Naples was covered with buckets of anemones and night-blooming stock, pale violets like enameled breastpins, strawflowers and bachelor’s buttons, and the covetous enveloping bloom of azaleas, the landlady insisted upon decorating the children’s table with poisonous pink-and-yellow paper flowers. She produced two children for the party, one with a sore under its nose, and one who had had to have its head recently shaved. The children arrived in corduroy pants worn over the seat like a convict’s head. The table was loaded with rock cakes and honey and warm pink lemonade.

The Russian boy brought a monkey which hopped about the table tasting from all the jams and throwing the spoons about recklessly.
Alabama watched them under the scraggly palms from the low sill of her room; the French governess tore ineffectually about on the outskirts of their activities.

“Tiens, Bonnie! Et toi, ah, mon pauvre chou-chou!” she shrieked without pause.

It was a witch’s incantation. What magic philter was the woman brewing to be drunk by the passing years? Alabama’s senses floated off on dreams. A sharp scream from Bonnie startled her back to reality.

“Ah, quelle sale bête!”

“Well, come here, dear, we’ll put iodine on it,” Alabama called from the casement.

“So Serge takes the monkey,” Bonnie stammered, “and he th—r—o—ws him at me, and he is horrible, and I hate the children of Naples!”

Alabama held the child on her knee. Her body felt very little and helpless to her mother.

“Monkeys have to have
something
to eat,” Alabama teased.

“You are lucky he has not bitten your nose,” Serge commented unsolicitiously. The two Italians were only concerned about the animal, rubbing him affectionately and soothing him with dreamy Italian prayer like a love song.

“Che—che—che,” chittered the parakeet.

“Come,” said Alabama, “I will tell you a story.”

The young eyes hung suspended on her words like drops of rain under a fence rail; their little faces followed hers like pale pads of clouds beneath the moon.

“I would never have come,” declaimed Serge, “if I had known there wasn’t going to be Chianti!”

“Nor I, Hail Mary!” echoed the Italians.

“Don’t you want to hear about the Greek temples, all bright reds and blues?” Alabama insisted.

“Si, Signora.”

“Well—they are white now because the ages have worn away their original, dazzling——”

“Mummy, may I have the compote?”

“Do you want to hear about the temples or not?” said Alabama crossly. The table came to a dead expectant silence.

“That’s all I know about them,” she concluded, feebly.

“Then may I please now have the compote?” Bonnie dripped the purple stain down the knife pleats of her best dress.

“Doesn’t Madame feel that we have had enough for one afternoon?” said Mademoiselle in dismay.

“I feel sick, a little,” confessed Bonnie. She was ghastly pale.

The doctor said he thought it was the climate. Alabama forgot to get the emetic he prescribed at the drugstore and Bonnie lay in bed for a week, living on limewater and mutton broth while her mother rehearsed the waltz. Alabama was distracted; Madame Sirgeva had been right—she couldn’t do two turns with the orchestra unless it slowed up. The Maestro was adamant.

“Mother of women,” the girls breathed from the dark corners. “She will break her back so!”

Somehow she got Bonnie well enough to board the train. She bought them a spirit lamp for the voyage.

“But what will we do with it, Madame?” asked Mademoiselle suspiciously.

“The British always have a spirit lamp,” explained Alabama, “so when the baby gets croup they can take care of it. We never have anything, so we get to know the inside of many hospitals. The babies all come out the same, only later in life some prefer spirit lamps and some prefer hospitals.”

“Bonnie has not got croup, Madame,” Mademoiselle reproved huffily. “Her illness is the result solely of our visit.” She wanted the train to start to extricate herself and Bonnie from Neapolitan confusions. Alabama wanted also to be extricated.

“We should have taken the train-de-luxe,” said Bonnie. “I am in rather a hurry to get to Paris.”

“This is the train-de-luxe, snob!”

Bonnie gazed at her mother in impassive skepticism.

“There are many things in the world you don’t know, Mummy.”

“It’s just barely possible.”

“Ah,” fluttered Mademoiselle approvingly, “Au ’voir, Madame, au ’voir! And good luck!”

“Good-bye, Mummy. Do not dance too hard!” called Bonnie perfunctorily as the train moved off.

The poplar trees before the station jingled their tops like pockets full of silver money; the train whistled mournfully as it rounded a bend.

“For five lire,” said Alabama to the dog-eared cabdriver, “you must take me to the Opera House.”

She sat alone that night without Bonnie. She hadn’t realized how much fuller life was with Bonnie there. She was sorry she hadn’t sat more with her child when she was sick in bed. Maybe she could have missed rehearsals. She had wanted her child to see her dance the ballet. In one more week of rehearsal she would have her debut as a ballerina!