She was a slight girl, not quite thin, with soft brown hair and hazel eyes. She seemed not to weigh anything, to be an essence with nothing solid about her. Since she was good at hopping around to music, jumping and whirling at one and the same time, skipping rope, and hanging by her feet from a certain low limb in the yard, they sent her to dance school early on.
Miss Ellen Thomas was the name of the white-haired little lady who taught. Miss Ellen had all the good families in Kingsbury sending their children to her. Mary Kerr was first an elf, then a wood sprite, then a snowflake. Once, dressed as a Christmas fairy, she did a number alone for a program. Her dress was pale blue, like snow at night, with sparkles sewn on. The music was from The Nutcracker. Everyone clapped. At age eleven she was too old for Miss Ellen’s classes. Miss Ellen, having by personal admission reached fifty-five, was too old also. No more Twinkle Toes. She tearfully retired.
In school Mary Kerr was picked for stunts and dances in plays. She once did cartwheels across the stage. She and one of the boys who had been brought up in Texas learned a Mexican hat dance. He had gotten the hat out West and it swallowed him, but she could actually dance right into it and around the brim.
The football boys, once the season was over, stole a cheerleader’s costume and tried to get her to dance in a local night spot where a combo played, but her mother heard about it and said she couldn’t. They were from too good a family: They were Harbisons. Just as well have it understood. Those boys were high school, older; she was still in junior high. Mary Kerr had seen the short silver skirt and regretted its loss.
“You don’t know how to do a dance like that,” her mother said, frowning.
“I would make it up as I went along,” Mary Kerr argued. She didn’t know how she did this, but just did it. Her father thought it might have been fun, but what did he ever get to decide? After this quarrel, she came as usual and nestled in the crook of his arm, where it felt the best of all to be. They understood things together.
“It’s Mother,” she said. “She makes a fuss over every little thing.”
“She doesn’t think it’s so little.” He sighed. “You know she works too hard. She’s under a strain. If anything happened to me, she’d have to sell this house. It would be too much for just you two.”
“Why would it? If she works—” Her science degree from Duke, her position at the research lab, starched white coats in the closet, a fresh one three times a week. Other days, plain office clothes— trim suits, usually. Kate. Married to a Harbison, the best. She wore everything looking like a page in a fashion magazine, even the lab coats, one hand in a large pocket (except when she took the kitten), talking earnestly, precisely.
He shook his head. “It would be too much.”
“There’s Penney.” They had had Penney as cook and maid forever, and her mother, Old Nellie, before her. Penney was named for J. C. Penney, a store.
Mary Kerr snuggled closer. She forgot disappointment, everything but being there.
“Your mother,” he was going on, half to himself, “deserved better than me.”
“Better than a Harbison?”
He laughed and patted her. “You’ll understand sometime.” He must have meant his health, but he couldn’t be blamed for not being well, could he? The door in the hall opened and closed. Mother. She stood there before them, all locked together.
“I had a chance at lunch to make that call. You know, Don, this woman sounds very sensible. Where she came from with a name like that, who knows?”
“What name?” Poppy said.
“Delida. Madame Delida, at that. With her accent, I guess she has a right to it. European.”
“It might be real.”
“People like that,” said Kate, “are like weeds grown up in the night.”
“Her studio’s over on Haley Street.”
“Then the bus would be all right.”
“I thought of that.”
Dancing! It must be that, speaking of a studio. They were talking as if she wasn’t there. (So they often did, and might as well be alone, her mother at the tall dresser mirror in their bedroom, seated on the bench in front of it, brushing out the ends of her bright, gossamer-fine hair, swirling it up, pinning it loosely at the sides for the night. The silver-backed brush, which was also good for striking with, would make a rhythm with what she said. Poppy sitting on the end of the four-poster bed, so long in the Harbison family.)
But I am here, thought Mary Kerr.
Poppy looked down at her. “Would you like that? Taking up dancing again?”
“She might even get a fellowship on the strength of it. Someday.” Her mother walked off. College, she meant. So far away.
The studio was on the top floor of an old three-story concrete office building, up two flights of stairs. Madame Delida herself was a slight, dark, foreign woman with a long face—horse-faced, you could say. She had an accent, and looked you straight in the eye when she spoke.
“The dance,” she said to Mary Kerr, and took her hand. “We should continue with it year by year. So do we gain the different stages.”
“I studied when I was little,” Mary Kerr explained. “I went to Miss Ellen Thomas’s dance school. I was an elf first, then a Christmas fairy.”
“Mais oui” said Madame Delida, “but now you will move on.”
“I graduated,” said Mary Kerr.
“But from the dance,” said Madame Delida, “to graduate is no such thing. To grow older, yes. Me—I am older, but still I dance.”
“You don’t look older,” said Mary Kerr politely.
It wasn’t quite true. Madame Delida’s hair was dyed and her arms looked stringy. She had cords in her neck. One of her feet sat crooked, like she might have a bunion or a broken toe. But she was straight as flint, and dared to wear a boat-necked leotard and tights, though usually with a short skirt, and once with some loose slacks.
In flat shoes, that first afternoon, she held out an extra pair for Mary Kerr. Madame Delida walked like a duck in those shoes. Following, Mary Kerr walked like Charlie Chaplin. Leading her pupil to the center of the large empty room, which breathed early summer air, Madame Delida reviewed what Miss Ellen might have taught or might have neglected.
The positions: flat, then flat again but un relevé aussi. Le troisième, oui, puis le quatrième (ah, bon), un relevé (bonbonbon!) et en pointe un jour peut-être. Now … the barre. Then came the arabesques, the pliés, the ronds de jambe. “The turn-out!” cried Madame Delida, in triumph. “Parfait!”
Madame Delida turned on the music. She took Mary Kerr by the hand once more, while the needle swayed upon the old black record, Mozart, Chopin, or something.
Madame Delida came to call.
The secluded circle off the boulevard, the big, silent, peaked-roofed houses, among them the Harbison house, with its carriage entrance. Mary Kerr was exceptionally talented, was her message to Kate Harbison, who asked her into the sitting room but offered her nothing. Mary Kerr was truly étonnante. Madame Delida proposed some work in ensemble, but only in the modern dance style. A mixture of modern and ballet, for as yet ensemble work in ballet was not possible. Not enough were trained to make a credit. As for modern, first groups of three, then on to twelves, it might be. A program should be their goal.
Mary Kerr practiced every afternoon in the upstairs hall.
“I’m sick of that damned music,” Poppy said.
“I guess that’s part of it,” Kate said with a sigh.
“Can we ask her to a party?” Mary Kerr wanted to know. Her mother was giving one.
A silence at the supper table. “I don’t think that would be quite the thing,” said her mother.
“She’s bound to have friends here,” said Poppy. “She won’t need ours.”
“But all she has is a room,” said Mary Kerr. “Over on Quinn Street. She’d like to go out somewhere, I bet.”
“Over there,” her mother said vaguely.
Quinn was a poor street. No more was said.
Mary Kerr and Madame Delida had now been joined by two girls who had previously attended Miss Ellen’s school and three boys out of nowhere, who got sweaty and obviously worried about how they looked in tights. Now almost a teacher, too, with instructive feet, knowing themselves observed, Mary Kerr helped to plot out a program number, leaning together with Madame Delida over large blank sheets to map the staging and the flow of the dancers. This process had a name. Choreography.
In late August, the program.
Mary Kerr’s parents not only attended, but stirred out relatives and friends by the dozens. “That pretty child of Don and Kate’s. You wouldn’t think to look at her she could dance to almost any sort of thing.” So it was repeated.
It was a wonderful evening—everyone said so. Mary Kerr was in four numbers. She danced solo twice and once in a trio, performing “Approach of Night” with another girl and the only older boy who had lasted. He was a freshman up at Davidson College, and none of them knew him well, but he was, as Madame Delida said, very flexible. Then there was a soldier’s march for twelve, girls and boys together, all stair-stepping in strict little military coats, all recruited in the last fortnight and trained to step in time. They made lines and star shapes, Vs, and ranks of different depths. They marched to “I Love a Parade,” and then turned into wooden soldiers, stiff as clocks. They burst into combat and raised the flag on Iwo Jima and circled with linked arms to the red, white, and blue. Applause exploded. It was all exciting. Madame Delida, with three yellow roses pinned to the strap of her evening gown, stood in the receiving line along with the superintendent of the high school where the program was presented, his wife, and the president of the PTA with her husband. Madame Delida’s eyes brimmed with tears of pride.
The Harbisons—Kate, Don, and Mary Kerr—walked home together that night. “Only a short way,” Poppy had said, “and such a nice night, too,” he added, refusing offers right and left to give them a lift. Mother was not so eager, but when Mary Kerr, who kept running off her euphoria and excess energy by circling them and flinging herself far forward of them, then back behind like a frolicking puppy, caught up and joined arms with them, her mother fell in step and pretended to be marching as the dancers had, while Poppy and Mary Kerr hummed.
Poppy bent to kiss his daughter’s cheek. “You looked so pretty up there, honey.”
“Thanks,” said Mary Kerr, not missing a step or a note.
Her mother wore a long dress—they were the fashion then—and held her skirts skillfully up with her free hand. “A nice-looking boy,” she remarked, referring to the tall one, Greg, who had worn a loose black shirt and played “Night.” “Didn’t he ever ask you out?”
“Oh, I guess,” said Mary Kerr.
“She’s too young for that,” Poppy said, and squeezed her arm.
“High school,” her mother said. “Fourteen.”
They kept trooping on, this family of three, under the thick lofty trees, under the moon. To get home they had to cross a business intersection, now deserted, the lights observing their lonely task of changing from red to green and back again. They had just crossed and were passing a small shopping area, recessed in shadows, faced in dark-stained wood, locked and silent.
Some figures in what at first seemed a crowd, an onslaught, ran sudden and silent out of an alley between the buildings. There were really only four or five at the most, and young at that. Mary Kerr thought at first it was a joke, some of the dancers playing a trick and doing another dance in the street, but it wasn’t that at all. What it really was, if anything, they never knew, the whole thing began and ended so quickly. They may not have been black, but Mother later always said they were. They arced in front, seemed to dart past to get away completely, but then, as if in a common undiscussed inspiration, turned and kicked a garbage can over just in front of the three of them, clutching together, with Poppy shouting “What you think you’re doing there?” and pulling away to run at them. Mary Kerr and her mother clung to hold him back—he shouldn’t be getting into anything, it would be a strain—but by then the runners had struck. The tin garbage lid was flying out into the moonlight like a hurled disk and the can itself was spewing contents from its mouth like a sick elephant. Rotten tomatoes, clumps of spaghetti, bits of hamburger, chicken bones, and fried potatoes came pelting out before them. Then the gang was gone.
The Harbisons stood stunned and afraid, wondering if it was over. Mother stood with her pretty skirts pulled to one side. She had gotten splashed with garbage.
“Well,” said Poppy, “that was a visitation. They do go in for dancing it out.” He had used a phrase of Mary Kerr’s. When she talked about getting rid of anger or disappointment, she would say she needed to “dance it out.”
“You can think it’s funny if you want to,” Mother said. Still clutching her skirt to one side, she walked rapidly ahead of the other two. It had somehow been their fault.
Cool and protected, the houses along the way stood under lofty trees in their tranquil yards, where the moonlight found whatever entry it could, pouring through the trees, splashing light between the shadows on the lawns. Then they were home.
In the hallway, just inside the door, Mother took off her long dress, with its flowered pattern of lavender and rose. She stood for a moment in her ankle-length white slip and stepped out of her shoes. Leaving the shoes on the rug, she went into the kitchen, where Mary Kerr, following for something to eat—dancing had made her hungry—saw her wad up the dress and stuff it in the garbage.
“Oh, no, you can’t! It’ll clean!”
Her mother’s answer was to walk straight out, upstairs, and to bed.
Her father had come to the kitchen door. “Peaches,” he began. It was one of his pet names for her.
“She’s mad,” said Mary Kerr. “I never saw them before. It wasn’t my fault.”
“Mine, either,” Poppy said. “Just that we wanted to walk and she didn’t.” He turned to go upstairs, looking tired, but turned back. “You were wonderful, Baby.” He put his arms out to dance position. “Here. Teach me to do that whirligig.”
She caught his hands to swing him around in a simple maneuver. Then his foot went wrong. He laughed.
“Start all over,” she said. “Now.” Presently they both were laughing. Her bad feelings disappeared.
Upstairs a door slammed shut. They stopped and looked.
Poppy said, “Don’t worry about that dress. She’ll be back to get it when she simmers down.”
Once again Madame Delida came to see Kate Harbison. “What a treasure do we have in her! How far she could go! Her tours! Her élévations! I speak with true feeling, Madame.”
“I understand,” said Kate, but this was what she said when she didn’t mean it, as Mary Kerr, from the corner of the stair landing, out of sight, well knew.
It was a fact that when she danced she felt like going straight on up, never stopping. It would seem that at the height of her own power to lift, the music would come to fill in for her. It acted like wires that pull a stage puppet up; it bore her through the air like a trapeze.
She was feeling all this when, walking home one fall day from her class, she saw her father walking toward home, too, only diagonally from her own route, along another street. He had not seen her yet. It was a hot fall afternoon with sun beating fiercely through the trees.
Mary Kerr began to dance. She did piqué-arabesques up and down the Strattons’ front steps and tours jetés on the sidewalk before the Van Meters’. She mimicked the Ray Bolger scarecrow dance and the Gene Kelly waltz, while Poppy laughed at her and clapped. He was standing in the sun. She swirled up to him and ended in a frog walk, clowning.
He pulled her straight. “What a show, just for me.” His face was fiery. “Let’s get home, Peaches, it’s way too hot for all this.” She moved to tuck under his arm and help him. “Splendid, Baby,” he was panting to her. “My own Margot.”
She sat down with him on their own front steps. It was then he said very calmly and formally that she’d better call the doctor, but by then she had guessed, she realized when she thought about it later, that they both knew already what might come next.
Waiting for the ambulance, a pale hand to a hectic face, her mother said, “What were you thinking of? Didn’t you know better?”
“Better than what?”
“Why, getting him out in this sun like that. It’s way too strong.”
“He was out in it already, walking home. I just happened to see him.”
But Mary Kerr wasn’t being believed. She wasn’t even being heard.
“He’ll tell you! It wasn’t me.” Mary Kerr ran past her mother, toward the door where he had made it to the couch to lie down until help arrived, saying, “He’ll tell you that! I know he will,” but her mother had caught her arm.
“You can’t disturb him now. You can’t.” From the corner the ambulance wail was sounding.
Twice in the hospital when she saw him after bypass surgery, she had said, snuggling as close as she dared, “Tell Mother. Tell her I didn’t get you out in the sun that day.”
He didn’t understand. “Who thought you did?”
“I mean, it wasn’t my fault.”
“I will,” he had whispered, and she knew that if he promised, he would do it; his splotched, patient, smiling face had never moved itself to mouth a single promise to her it would not keep. But he never said it, not actually that she knew of—that is, he never said it in front of her and her mother both. He tried once when she reminded him, but her mother, seeming to know what she had in mind, what she was trying to get at, once and for all time, had interrupted; and then, when Mary Kerr had gotten back to the subject again, the nurse walked in and behind her came the doctor, asking them to leave.
In the hall they waited too long; then in the sitting room they lingered too long there. “Is he going to die?” Mary Kerr whispered in dread. But the doctor’s large step—he was tall and pale in white, white all over—whitened out her faint voice, which had been tuned only for her mother to hear. Kate was rising to see the doctor, meet him on a grown-up level, and as she rose Mary Kerr said again, “He’s not going to die, is he?” But they were not listening and when she spoke louder it came out like a shout: “Listen! He’s not going to—”
“For heaven’s sake, Mary Kerr!” Her mother turned on her, as if she were striking off a childish hand that was pulling at her skirt.
She was sinking down then, no higher than her mother’s strong firm ankle, insect-sized on the gigantic stage of the world’s business. Even back in the room, grasping his hand, she could not find her voice again.
And then it was too late.
Soon after the funeral, Kate Harbison cancelled Mary Kerr’s dance lessons. “I’ve heard too many things about your Madame Delida,” she said.
“What things?”
“Oh, some man at a filling station. There’s gossip. He’s half her age.”
“But maybe he likes her.”
“Undoubtedly,” said Kate. To Madame Delida she gave financial reasons. She did this by telephone.
So for a third time Madame Delida came to the house, this time frantic. Penney went to the door and said no one was at home.
“I will teach her free of charge!” Madame Delida shouted.
Mary Kerr was upstairs in her room. She overheard. She wanted to run downstairs and tell her not to worry, she would find a way to come back. But her mother had locked her door in passing.
“Don’t worry!” she called out, but was not heard, she guessed, because she heard the front door close.
Kate was somewhere in the house, silent.
Mary Kerr lay on her bed, holding tight in one palm a medal Madame Delida had given her. Madame Delida had won it in Paris, she said. Ecole de danse, rue de Corneille was written around its rim. In the middle was a Degas dancer, one long shoe pointed, the fragile skirt flounced forward, while she leaned with arched hands descending.
That very morning Mary Kerr had started her first period and she felt a stir of mystery, with no words to explain it. It seemed a finishing off of things not finished at all. I’ll go see her, she thought.
But when she did, she found Madame Delida packing a brass-bound steamer trunk that smelled of old perfume bottles. She was folding mysterious laces to put in the drawers. “This town will never be good to you, my treasure. You, too, will learn someday.”
So Poppy was gone with his arm to snuggle under, and long ago the white kitten, and now this woman, too, was going, back into the night she had sprung up out of, as Mary Kerr’s mother said, though not like a weed. She had opened doors and now was leaving. The roof where the sun and moon beat down was empty. Kate was there below it, a presence in the house.