RETURN TO SWAN LAKE

a novel by Gary Canup

Chapter 3

They were bicycling up a long private lane bordered with stately Lombardy poplars, the lane winding through an estate that was spacious and wooded and well-kept, and when they drew within sight of the Georgian mansion, Davy jammed on his brakes and skidded to a halt, and with open mouth just stared at the place.

Jan too stopped and looked back at him. "What's the matter, Davy?"

"You live there?" he said.

She nodded almost apologetically.

Davy gaped at the mansion. He had known that her parents were rich but he hadn't known they were this rich.

Jan's father, it turned out, was a wealthy corporate executive the nature of whose job demanded that he travel extensively among the major cities of North America and Europe. Rather than endure long absences from his wife and daughter, he had elected to take them with him wherever he had gone, and as a result Jan was quite well-traveled and worldly, having lived for a time in such glamorous cities as London, Rome, and Vienna, rooming in luxurious hotels or staying as guests in the homes of important people. She had visited nearly all the great museums of Europe, had heard their symphony orchestras, had seen performances by their major ballet companies with her ballet-minded mother, and she and her parents, on the whole, had led a very glittering life.

Recently, however, her father had purchased this grand old home in Bloomdale Heights, an upper-class community that bordered Davy's middle-class one. The family was finally going to settle down. Father believed it was the first step in giving their daughter a much-needed sense of permanence and stability. Tired of the stuffiness of private schools and private tutors, Jan had decided to enroll in the local public school, over the objections of her mother but with the support and encouragement of her father, himself a product of the public schools. Although officially she had already graduated from the sixth grade, Jan had spent the final two weeks of elementary school in Davy's class to make new friends and to acquaint herself with the workings of a public school system. Though Jan had befriended a few of the girls in the class, she seemed to have singled Davy out for a special friendship, and ever since the start of summer vacation the two had become inseparable. Yet he had never visited her home before — until today.

The end of the private lane encircled a majestic fountain in front of the mansion and they left their bikes on the lawn and advanced up the walk to the portico, the columns of which were slender and elegant. She opened the door and stood aside for him to enter, which he did, after first removing his cap, like a pilgrim entering a great cathedral. She closed the door behind them, and Davy stood gazing around the magnificent foyer, wringing his cap. Never in his life had he witnessed firsthand such a lavish display of superfluous wealth. He had thought only hotels and theaters possessed such grand foyers. A regal marble staircase ascended to the gallery of the second floor, and an ornate crystal chandelier hung overhead. On either side of the foyer a spacious entranceway opened on rooms of equal luxury and splendor — to the right a drawing room, whose sumptuous furniture was arranged to accommodate cultured and leisurely conversation; and to the left a dining room, in which high-backed chairs flanked a long polished table decked with floral centerpieces beneath a row of smaller chandeliers that hung from the lofty ceiling.

"Wow!" Davy said. "Just wow!"

"Do you like it?"

"It's all so — wow! Just what does your father do?"

"He's a businessman or something like that. I don't really know, to be honest with you. He travels a lot. He's away a lot. I know that."

"Good afternoon, Miss Summers." A silver-haired old gentleman in livery had entered the foyer and slightly bowed.

"Good afternoon, Edward. I would like you to meet my friend, Mr. David Longley. Davy, this is our butler, Edward."

"I am very pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Longley," the butler said with another slight but formal bow.

"Hi," Davy said with a strained grin, wringing his cap.

Jan snatched his cap away and handed it to the butler. "Edward, is Mother home?"

"She arrived about twenty minutes ago, Miss Summers. She is currently in her office with Madame Jenkins."

"Damn," Jan muttered under her breath. "Did Mother tell you to notify her the moment I got in?"

"No, Miss Summers."

"Good. Then don't tell them we're here, okay, Edward?"

"As you wish, Miss Summers."

"Thanks, Eddie. We're going up to my room now." She headed up the marble staircase with Davy in tow.

"A butler and everything," Davy muttered after Edward had left the foyer.

"Please don't say wow again."

"This is like being in an old movie," Davy said instead.

"Sometimes I call him Eddie to try and get him to call me Jan instead of Miss Summers all the time, but he won't do it. He's too well trained. He's a very nice old gentleman, but he's awfully stuffy."

At the top of the staircase stood a room under construction, although the workers had apparently knocked off for the day. The door had been removed from its hinges and stood against the outer wall. Sawdust powdered the threshold and a metal tool box rested on the floor beside the open doorway. The interior, Davy saw with a peek into the room, was an eyesore of building materials and rubble. The sheet of canvas that protectively covered the floor was speckled with paint and littered with chips of plaster and wood. Electrical cables snaked their way among a clutter of obstacles that included stacks of lumber and isolated tools such as power saws and sledge hammers. Sheets of plasterboard leaned against one wall. Ceiling panels were missing in several places and bundles of electrical wiring hung from the gaps like jungle vines.

"What's this room going to be?" Davy asked.

"My private home ballet studio," Jan said with an expression that indicated mixed feelings. "Mother is having it built to give me an edge over the other girls. The builders have to install studio windows and lay a new floor. They even have to knock out a wall to expand the room to professional dimensions." (Davy, peeking back into the room, noticed indeed a gaping jagged hole in the far wall, through which he could see the sunlit area of the adjacent room.) "She started the project as soon as we moved here," Jan continued. "I suppose it's rather comical in its way. Come on, I'll show you my room."

An ornate balustrade separated the gallery from the foyer below, the gallery virtually on a level with the large chandelier that hung over the foyer. She led Davy into a large elegant room that contained a canopied bed, a fancy dressing table, curtains that hung from the high ceiling to the plushly carpeted floor, everything adorned with pink lace and frilly chiffon. The room was also equipped with all the latest electronic gadgetry: a computer, a cellular telephone, a CD player, a DVD player, and a digital TV. She even had her own private bathroom.

"W —" Davy caught himself. "Very nice," he said.

"Thank you."

"What's all that stuff on that shelf over there?"

"They're my ballet awards," Jan replied, not without embarrassment. "Mother says I should be proud of them. I didn't want to set them out but Mother told me that if I didn't display them in here then she was going to display them downstairs in the foyer."

"You must be pretty good to have won all these. What's this one say? First Place, European Ballet Competition. No wonder she's building you a studio."

"Oh, she's done a lot more than that. She's built a network of ballet contacts like you wouldn't believe. She's constantly schmoozing influential people in the ballet world to win their favors. She's not even above bribing and bullying judges in competitions. In fact, she's probably won more of these awards than I have. Come here, Davy, I want to show you something."

She removed from a closet a plain cardboard box and they sat down on the floor.

"This is my rock collection," she told him. "I've been collecting rocks since I was little. I can see you're not very impressed; they're all pretty ordinary-looking, I know. That's the trouble with them, I guess, they look like I just scooped them out of a driveway or something. But each one is deeply meaningful to me. Every place I've ever been in my life I've picked up a rock to remember it by. Most of them come from hotels where we've stayed around the world. It's kind of silly, I guess. Nobody ever seems interested in them but me."

"I'm interested," Davy asserted.

"Really? Well, some of them come from interesting places. These real pretty ones right here come from my birthplace in New Haven, Connecticut. My parents met while attending Yale. When I was a little kid I was into rocks primarily because of their prettiness. That's how my collection got started. Some of them are from famous places. This one right here is an actual piece out of Beethoven's tombstone. And this is a small fragment of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Would you like to hold it?"

Davy took the fragment into his hand and grinned at Jan. "Gee, I'm holding a little piece of Europe in my hand!"

She clapped him on the shoulder. "That's the spirit! Don't worry, I'm not a vandal or anything like that, I just find these pieces lying on the ground by famous places and I pick them up. Some adults I show this collection to look at me suspiciously as if to say 'How do I know these really come from the places you say they do?' as if they expect me to prove everything, as if I just picked up a bunch of rocks and made up stories about them. That's the problem with adults, they never believe what you tell them. That's why I stopped showing it to them. This girl I knew in dance school in Madrid, a really talented dancer who died of leukemia, knew I had a collection and she left me this rock in her will. It came from outside a hospital where she was being treated. She had picked it up one day as a good luck charm, I guess. And you see this one here? Would you like to hold it?"

Davy took the rock in his hand. "It's almost perfectly round," he observed. He lifted it to his nostrils and cringed. "And it smells kind of bad."

"That's one of my grandfather's gall stones."

Davy dropped the rock into the box with distaste and wiped his hand on his pants.

Jan laughed and clapped her hands. Then she looked contrite and touched his shoulder. "I'm sorry, Davy. That was kind of a dirty trick, I guess."

The boy gave a squeamish smile.

The girl gazed pensively into the box. "This is my childhood," she mused. "A cardboard box full of rocks."

Two voices were approaching along the gallery, one of them heavily accented.

"Uh-oh," Jan said.

"Little Jannikins keeps telling me that she wants to be a teacher of modern dance when she grows up, but she doesn't fool me. She yearns to become a prima ballerina as desperately as I did when I was her age. And she'll make it, too. She has a hundred times more talent than her old mom ever had. No teaching modern dance for my little girl."

Two women stopped at the doorway.

"Oh, Janice! I didn't know you were home. Come on, dear. Time to get ready for ballet practice."

"Yes, Mother."

"Say hello to Madame Jenkins, dear."

"Hello, Madame Jenkins."

From where Davy sat, he could not see this Madame Jenkins, but he could see Jan's mother, a beautiful, trim, fashionably attired woman of about forty. She looked at Davy and her smile disappeared. "Who might this be?"

"Mother, I would like you to meet Mr. David Longley, my friend from school. Davy, this is my mother."

The boy awkwardly started to rise.

"Please inform Mr. Longley that he must go home now, it is time for you to practice ballet."

Davy clumsily resumed his seat.

"Honey, what have I told you to do whenever you sit on the floor? Why are you not in frog position, dear?" She turned her smile to Madame Jenkins.

Jan wearily maneuvered into a sitting position in which her back was straight and the bottoms of her feet were pressed together and the heels of her feet pulled in towards her pelvis.

"That's more like it. Get ready for practice now, sweetie. Don't make me tell you again." She and Madame Jenkins continued their tour of the mansion, Mother chatting amiably.

"I apologize for that, Davy," Jan said.

"I don't think she liked me," Davy remarked.

"Don't worry about it, she doesn't like anybody under the age of twenty-one."

"Not even you?"

"Sometimes I wonder."

"So what's frog position?" he asked.

"The position I'm sitting in right now. It squares off the pelvis and helps to develop turnout."

"Turnout?"

"That means outward rotation from the hip sockets."

Davy nodded, pretending to understand.

"It's not as painful as it sounds. It just develops the look that ballerinas need."

"Why does a ballerina need to look like a frog?"

"It doesn't make you look like a frog, silly," Jan replied with amusement, "it just makes your feet turn out naturally and helps your dancing."

"So who's this Madame Jenkins character?"

Jan lowered her voice. "She's this hot-shot ballet teacher who heads one of the country's most prestigious ballet schools, which just happens to be based in this city. Mother is arranging for me to audition with her. Mother says a protege of Madame Jenkins can go far in the ballet world. Madame Jenkins is known for driving her students hard so naturally I'm really thrilled to get a chance to be her student. I practice at her studio now, but I'm not actually her student yet, to be that I have to pass her audition. I hear her school needs funding and I'm sure that's what Mother was arranging in her office."

"Can your mother do that?"

"All it takes is a check from Father."

The girl sighed heavily.

"Well, I guess I have to go to ballet practice now."

Davy took the hint and got to his feet. "Thanks for having me over, Jan. You really do have a beautiful house and room."

"Davy, could we maybe go to your house next time?" She looked up at him almost pleadingly. "I don't want us to meet here anymore. I think you just saw why."

"Sure," Davy said. "How about tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow would be great. You really are a dear," she told him.

"Will I be able to get my cap back from your butler?"

"Sure, I'll come with you and see to it."

She got to her feet and they left the room.