Same Old, Same Old

         
By the time I turned seven, my father no longer traveled as much as he once had. His new, great mission in life became to bring fame to his daughters – not the two-bit celebrity that had come his way from the airing of his firm’s radio jingles within the Hispanic markets of New York and New Jersey, but a reputation extending far beyond the borders of both states and crossing over cultural barriers. He considered himself sufficiently well connected to attain any goal he set his mind to, and sufficiently well off that his money could buy results. He was a big believer in the American dream; to him, acclaim and even creative talent were commodities, like food and three-piece suites, and that in his adopted home acquiring them was simply a matter of paying the going price. To this end, he sought out the Clarita Roche Dance Studio of Queens, deciding that this would be Alexia’s and my stepping-stone to international renown as ballerinas. For the right financial incentive, the eponymous Ms. Roche could be persuaded to share his vision. 

Ms. R. was retired, and once famous herself as a principal dancer with the Cuban National Ballet Company. On her studio’s lobby walls resided ancient black and whites – now a distinct sepia yellow – of roles she once danced from Sleeping Beauty, Giselle, and Ophelia; of her prancing across the stage, clinging to a lover, or rising from the dead. When the parents of prospective students asked about her dancing days, she spoke of them in hushed tones, as though they were a period in her life and in the history of the world so sacred mere words could not do them justice. “Aah! That was long ago,” she would say airily and with the same sense of awe that precludes the pious from writing out the name of the deity in full. And then she would walk away.

She was elderly now, though still dashing, draped in garments that epitomized Movement and cast a spotlight on her own body’s every gesture and movement: flowing shawls, silk blouses, baggy trousers. She made her eyes huge in relief against dark green shadow; painted her lips in the deepest reds, splashed rouge over her temples and cheeks; combed her dark-blonde, shoulder-length hair as straight as a stage scrim to add drama to her already commanding presence. On days when her arthritic knees bothered her, she leaned heavily, yet always stylishly, on an ebony cane.

There was no structure to our twice-weekly dance classes. Ms. Roche’s whim governed what we did: barre-work one minute; rehearsal for future recitals the next; posing for photographs for the studio’s bi-annual catalogue – sometimes all three. Much of the time, Ms. R. seemed lost in a world of her own, barely acknowledging the lame-footed wannabes packed like sardines against her barre. When she did deign to give instruction, it was minimal. Commands would be fired from one, then another and another corner of the studio, catching her bemused students in a staccato crossfire that was barely intelligible.

She moved incessantly. Around the studio, and around her own axis, swaying and twirling in those colorful, loose-fitting outfits as if carried by the wind – sometimes a gentle breeze, sometimes a squall. Her philosophy seemed to be that real talent – if such were anywhere to be found in her studio – would have to garner what it could in the way of nourishment from the luminescence of her past glories, which she kept perfectly preserved in the aspic of her memory and burnished with every retelling, solicited or not.

In class, Ms. Roche concentrated mainly on cultivating in her acolytes the sense of beauty and rigor that had been the very air she breathed during her days on the world’s great stages. This could not be taught, she believed; it had to be instilled. So, rather than explain or demonstrate, she tended to count rhythms – almost in a private communion with herself, on which her students should consider themselves lucky to be able to eavesdrop – ebony cane tapping against the highly polished floor to the beat of whichever piece was being played by the accompanist at the upright. As she worked her way around the studio, she would check her posture a thousand times in the wall-to-wall mirrors. She was hard on her students, but harder still on herself. When she called out positions, she enunciated the French with brutal exactitude. “First – plié.” Then a deep, theatrical inhalation, with which she kept her students on tenterhooks, before she wrapped her mouth around the term for each following position as if they were a confession drummed out of her, syllable by syllable, using thumbscrews.

She did not expect her students or their parents to appreciate or comprehend the esteem that had once been hers. Destiny had bestowed on her honors that only the few could ever hope to experience, so there were levels on which it was impossible for her to communicate with us commonplace folk. She could bark orders; she could shake her head in exasperation when we executed a step wrongly or clumsily; but, in the final analysis, she had nothing to say to us. Nor did we have anything of value to say to her. Our questions or observations were dismissed with a well-timed faraway glance or a purposeful walking away – they were unworthy of the Great One’s expenditure of effort to respond to.

The one thing that seriously distressed Ms. R. was the spectacle of a ballerina committing the sin of incorrect form. She rarely took much interest in what was happening at the barre, but in those moments when she did, God help the miscreant who was caught in flagrante delicto. Ms. Roche would make her way to the back of the studio at a frightening clip, momentarily unconcerned about the precision of her own movement and gestures, and bring the offense to a halt with a series of rapid, explosive raps of her cane. “No, no, NO!” she would yell, enough anguish in her voice to suggest she had just witnessed an act of gross indecency. “The feet. The feet.” At any given session, there might be several students in desperate need of direction, but Ms. Roche bestowed her bounty on only one at a time. Her preferred method of doing this was a tattoo of sharp smacks to the chosen dancer’s feet and legs, courtesy of the ebony cane.

During those sessions when I was the object of the Ms. Roche’s pearls of wisdom, I would get tangled up in the cane and become so disorientated by her cries of woe that there was no correcting my form. But, more than her attention, I feared the splinters from her studio floor. The floor was never polished or oiled, and it dispensed dirt-encrusted barbs into the slippers of unsuspecting dancers. I treaded as lightly as I could, but those who abandoned themselves to the spell of the dance and forgot the dangers of the splinters did so at their peril. A disciple who allowed the shock of the sudden pain to distract her from the Higher Calling was dispatched, with a curt wave of the maestra’s hand, to the dressing room behind the studio to minister to her wounds. Although there were two to three splinter mishaps per class, nothing was ever done about the floor.

 Ms. Roche’s studio was coming apart at the seams. The chairs in the lobby were torn, their legs wobbled; the piano played off key, and the wood of the floor had darkened into a dingy yellow-brown from use and lack of maintenance. But no one complained, neither student nor parent. We all accepted the dilapidated appointments as the price of entry into the presence of greatness; as a measure, if you will, of the degree to which we were prepared to sacrifice to attain the state of grace that is Art. Even my father fell under the sway of Ms. Roche’s extravagant quirks. He liked her demeanor and the way she held herself; he especially admired her sense of entitlement to the pedestal on which she had placed herself, and the fact that she refused to trim that sense of entitlement one iota as the distance between the present and her moment in the sun grew. For six months he placed his daughters’ creative future entirely in her care, resisting his natural inclination to meddle or second-guess. Whenever he sought some confirmation of his belief in our genius, Ms. Roche walked away. It must have rankled for him to have to surrender control over any aspect of his life to another, though I suppose even Capote had to admit that there were one or two things he was not expert at. In the end, nothing was to be allowed to stand in the way of his grand scheme to make superstars of Alexia and me.

He was unshakable in his faith in our destiny. He contracted to rent Carnegie Hall for our first recital, offering Ms. Roche this majestic stage for her school’s annual showcase performance in exchange for the unwritten understanding that his offspring would be the principal dancers in most, if not all, of the pieces in the program. He furthermore appointed himself her artistic collaborator for the momentous event.

Our dance classes became unruly after Capote started visiting himself upon activities at the studio. He had his own thoughts about every little aspect of the upcoming show at Carnegie Hall: the dances that ought to included in the repertoire; which dancers should take which roles; the lighting design, staging and costumes. He expected Ms. Roche to take the most fanciful notions of his on board, even when they were entirely impractical. He demanded colorful off-the-shoulder frocks assembled from stitched-together gossamer scarves for the gypsy dances; white tutus with sequined leotards and crowns for the fairy dances; polka-dot dresses with bows, and dolls with matching outfits for the piece he intended to compose himself for the evening at Carnegie. He insisted upon Alexia and me each leading a column of ballerinas. He wanted the evening to be nothing less than a sensation, a show-stopping blend of both classical and fantastical dance sequences – poor Ms. Roche barely had a chance to draw breath in the face of this sandstorm of ambition, let alone to inject a note of reality to the proceedings.

Somehow, she found it within her to make concessions to Capote again and again, with a grace in adversity of which I would not have believed her capable. At his insistence, she added piece upon piece to the program for Carnegie Hall – trying to imagine what she really thought of most of his ideas still gives me the shudders all these years later. She seemed to be resigned to the ways of “money-men”; understood, presumably from her own dancing days, that the purist had to make certain accommodations with the philistine controlling the purse strings for the greater good of art. But when Capote’s suggestions crossed the line into absurdity, Ms Roche would put her foot – that is to say, her cane – down firmly, refusing to budge from the farthest corner of her sanctum until he yielded, or left the precincts of her studio altogether.

In theory, it was good that my father had found a new project to become engrossed in. He was always more vital and in better humor when chasing his latest illusion. Of course, the burden of making this particular dream a reality fell to Alexia and me. And not for the first time. Some years earlier, Capote had gotten it into his head that his daughters had the necessary aptitude to become linguistic prodigies. He signed us up for Korean lessons at a school in Flushing. Nothing as mundane as French or Italian for us! Our inability to become fluent within a week – which he gauged by having us translate “I am hungry,” “How are you today?,” “What are you making for dinner?,” and similar inanities – had exasperated him so he cancelled our lessons forthwith. Now, in the weeks and months leading up the dance recital, he made us watch the Lawrence Welk show every Sunday evening to study the styles of other performers; and every day we had to listen to recordings by singers from South America and Europe to further our immersion in matters cultural and to broaden our artistic horizons.

In time, our father’s enthusiasm became stifling. For years, Capote had been a presence in our lives that was, at the same time, both larger-than-life and phantom-like. Much of the time he was not traveling the globe on his latest business venture he spent under the roof of one alternative mistresses or families. Alexia and I had become used to his being a potent, but transient and unpredictable, influence, a brief gust of wind or an unexpected snowfall. Suddenly, he was too present. Too incessantly around. And demanding. His expectations of us weighed us down. Heaviest of all was the load of having to accept everything he told us, especially about our talents and our future. Did we realize, for instance, that only the very greatest stars got to perform at Carnegie Hall: Frank Sinatra, Maria Callas, and the like? The fact that our turn had come spoke highly of Alexia’s and my potential. There was no room for self-doubt, and there could be no turning back; we owed it to the world to share our gifts with it. 

Following the Carnegie Hall recital, there was no question but that we would be plucked from obscurity by an artistic community desperate to accrete our genius. Were we ready? We had better be, he insisted, making it sound almost ominous. Very few were chosen to receive the adulation of the many, he went on, and the limelight was the only place to be to escape the crushing deadweight of ordinariness. Ordinariness was a slow death. Ordinariness made the blood turn to dust, the spirit calcify. The soul wither like the dried-out pit of an avocado. Is that what we wanted for ourselves? he asked on the near-daily drives to Ms. Roche’s studio, never bothering with the tiresome formality of waiting for us to respond. We had reached a fork in the road of our development as human beings, and it was up to us to pick our path towards adulthood: the left or the right, the mediocre or the exceptional. Would we opt for the safeness of an everyday, humdrum existence, or reach out for the rush that came with acclaim and achievement – the bows taken and standing ovations given; the agonies of artistic birthing; the ecstasy of the delivery; the highs and heartbreaks of excellence? If one wanted to feel alive, Capote maintained, there really was only one choice, believe me. Or, rather, no choice at all.

Believe me.

For me, the one slight problem with all of this was that I happened to detest dancing. I didn’t much share my father’s enthusiasm for fame, either. I’d already developed serious doubts as to whether the evanescent joys of celebrity justified the six grueling days a week of rehearsal, the endless car rides to and from Astoria, the costume fittings and the bruising opprobrium of Ms. Roche’s ivory cane. And, frankly, I had just as many reservations in the matter of my pathetic attempts at interpretive dance ever attaining the necessary lift to take flight beyond the confines of a dank studio in Queens and alight onto the world’s great auditoria. My movements had all the physical grace of a…platypus – arms flailing, legs dragging, my long-faced échappés determinedly earthbound. Plus, impossible to confess though it might have been, I actually found nothing wrong with my life on Roosevelt Avenue – my friendships with the neighborhood kids; play in and around the house; the field trips with my P.S. 19 classmates to Broadway shows and the Museum of History. If this was obscurity, I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to be plucked from it.

Not that I can claim to have had the courage to confront my father head on. My tactics were far more subtle than that. (“Spineless” might be a better word.) I simply did not acknowledge his instructions; acted as if I had misunderstood or failed to hear them. That ploy worked well once in a while, taking the wind out of Capote’s sails before his temper could muster much force or direction. But mostly it just spurred him to march across the dance studio straight at me, in tense, powerful strides that left no room for dissent or negotiation. Whenever his urging for greater elegance in my posture or deeper emotion in my battements became too strident, I made myself invisible within the corps of my fellow prima-donnas-in-the-making. With luck, he would eventually tire of the hunt or be distracted by some new calamity waiting to happen unless he saved the day.

My father’s vision of every dance piece ever created seemed to require sweeping movements and grand gesticulation. Even Ms. Roche looked battered or green about the glands at some of his choreographic insights. They usually involved gypsies, hordes of them, and a warehouse worth of dolls. They always involved passion; passion by the ladle-load. Increasingly, Ms. R. would try to blend in with the furniture at the first sound of Capote’s tread on the stone floor outside her studio – not an easy undertaking given how sparsely furnished the studio was. It was only when he reminded her of the running ad in Diario Las Americas, promoting the upcoming gala at Carnegie Hall as being under the direction of the “Great Clarita Roche,” that she could be coaxed out of the shadows to lend her imprimatur to the goings-on at the barre.

Finally, the day of the recital arrived. We clambered into Capote’s Audi and took the Holland Tunnel into Manhattan. We were wedged into the tiny sedan, surrounded by shopping bags bursting with costumes, suitcases packed with shoes, duffel bags overflowing with props and accessories and makeup. The recital was an all-day affair. We headed out early for the hall, so early that my mother, who had us up at dawn rolling our hair, combing it into ringlets, painting our faces and packing up all our stuff, barely had time to engineer the high-rise bee-hive that was her trademark for special occasions. On the ride into Manhattan, all my father could talk about was how our lives were about to be turned on end. “You’ll see,” he kept repeating. “Starting tomorrow, everything changes.”

Once we arrived at Carnegie Hall, Capote disappeared to assume his dual roles as the evening’s host and stage manager. He issued precise instructions to the photographers he’d hired to record the event – particularly Alexia’s and my contributions to it – advised stagehands on the stage layout and lighting, assigned the performers’ families and friends their seats, and generally made a meal of every assignment he gave himself. My anxious mother was left to her own devices at the back of the hall, standing sentry over all our bags.

To my young eyes, the scene around us resembled bedlam more and more with every new wave of arriving audience members. Maybe it was the size of the venue or the enormity of the occasion; maybe it had something to do with Capote’s infinite capacity for mismanagement. 

Compared to anything we had seen before, the arena was certainly immense. At one point, Alexia and I killed time by playing hide and go seek, which served as our self-guided tour of the labyrinth that is Carnegie Hall. From the outside, as we’d approached it, it had seemed like any other large building jostling for elbow room on the streets of Manhattan, but inside it was a mystical, magnificent cavern, a semi-lit cocoon of a stage on which momentous occurrences took place. A million miniature light bulbs, producing an atmospheric glow that seemed to emanate from a great distance away, bathed center stage, backstage and the auditorium proper in the dissimulated luminescence of the densest part of a forest. Noise did not travel through the hall; instead, vibrations stayed rooted to their point of origin to create sounds so pure that talking above a whisper seemed sacrilegious. The décor could scarcely be described as understated, yet it did not shout for attention: the blood-red cushioned seats and dark wine-colored carpet; the orchestra pit painted black; oak stage floors and thick velvet curtains; the center-stage backdrop depicting a European garden with cypress trees and fountains.

The entire hall gave off a smell of well-seasoned wood, affluence and the wealth of the memories our father had spoken so often about – a rich history of standing ovations, encores, rapture and tears. All this was accented by delicate stenciling on the balconies, and crowned by a massive crystal chandelier that oversaw everything. A sense of wonderment rooted me to the spot; but only until it was replaced by an even stronger yen to explore all the hall’s nooks and crannies.  

While the adults busied themselves with the minutiae of seating arrangements and stagecraft, my sister and I jumped in and out of the black orchestra pit; wrapped ourselves in the heavy, dusty velvet stage curtains; swung from ropes that looked like Rapunzel’s braids; closed our eyes and counted to 20 against the scenic backdrop on the center stage; yelled our names from one wing of the stage to the other. Some official or other might try to stop us – “Little girl, don’t do that here”; “Where are your parents?” – but they never tried to catch us, so we simply adjourned to the backstage area, or to the makeup booths, the orchestra pit, between rows of plush seats under the overhang of the balcony, and resumed our playing. With every new arrival of a fledgling ballerina, the ranks of our game of hide-and-go-seek swelled, until it boasted a cast of 75 screaming kids and more, tearing around the stage and bumping into each other along the tight aisles.   

Mothers trawling for places at the back of the theater to store costumes and accessories became hysterical when they spotted their own daughters speeding by, carefully-coiffed ringlets unraveling, make-up running, pink leotards stained from knees to neck.

 “Wait till your father sees you,” my mother admonished, almost dropping the bags of our costumes at the disheveled sight of us, which would be captured for posterity in the poster-sized prints Capote later had made of us in our dancing prime. But for two hours nothing could come between us and our frenzied dashing about. Then, gradually, the smell of perspiration commingling with the scent of the violet toilet water my mother had dabbed on us early that morning made me think better of it, even as a triple whammy of excitement, anticipation and pandemonium began to infect mothers backstage and the audience in the well of the auditorium.

Ms. Roche and Capote were nowhere in evidence, so the running order of the recital and the matching of costumes to dance pieces became a frantic guessing game for the mothers. When the music struck up, a tidal wave of ballerinas broke onto center stage under lights flashing a disorienting palette of greens, blues, pinks, and reds. The taped music blared; parents in the audience struggled to be heard above the din, screaming the names of their daughters in the hope that they would turn their way for photographs. Some performers who had missed their cues rushed onto the stage after the piece had started, often with their mothers in tow armed with some forgotten accessory or other. At one point, the stage was so packed full of mothers and dancers and errant items of costume that the crush made the actual business of performing a dance almost impossible. It seemed to me that there were many dancers onstage I had never seen in class before, and all of us vying for a spot front of stage so that our pictures could be dutifully snapped for the family albums.

That night we danced in uneven and scattered formations, swaying back and forth as if a gale were blowing across the stage, gathering us up and depositing us like piles of leaves. Some dancers stood petrified by stage fright; others had to keep their eyes locked on the feet of their neighbors in order to stay up with the steps. At one moment, my father muscled his way to the wings, gestured wildly at me to separate myself from the knot of disorganized dancers, and called out: “Barbara, get away from them, or I’m going to kill you!” (Threatening to kill people – me, in particular – seemed to be becoming his solution to every problem.) At first, thanks to the glare of the footlights, I couldn’t see him. When I acted as if I had not heard him, he made his way to the backstage during my costume change, grabbed one of my ears, and ran over his solution to the problem in hand a second time.

What he wanted most of all was to get photographs of me on my own, center stage at Carnegie Hall. The big soloist. Unfortunately for him, standing out from the crowd was not in my nature. I didn’t care for stardom or special attention; I just wanted to be one of the gang, have a good time with all the other crazy, two-left-footed, would-be but never-were-going-to-be prima ballerinas. It was five-year-old Alexia who proved, that day, to be a natural for the limelight. She was the main attraction. She only had to point a foot, raise an arm, or tilt her head to bring inspiration raining down from the rafters onto her narrow shoulders. The dance steps came effortlessly to her. She commanded the stage so completely the other students kept their distance, as if driven away from her personal space by magnetic repulsion. Somehow she was able to organize her dance group into perfect formation; it followed her lead without hesitation or misstep, in striking contrast to the anarchy breaking out all around.

For five hours we danced; then – abruptly it seemed to us, though it must have felt like an eternity in the coming to the audience – it was all over. Suddenly Ms. Roche, who, throughout the recital, had been conspicuous by her absence, was on stage being draped with bouquets of red roses. My father joined her and took his own bow, which, somewhat to my surprise, earned him cheers and thunderous applause. A truce of sorts was forged between them in the bliss of shared acclamation.   

Taking the Holland Tunnel home that night, my mother and sister slept in the car. Capote, all his earlier misgivings about my performance forgotten, could not stop rattling on about how magnificent the recital had been. I was too exhausted either to sleep or to pay heed to my father’s rose-tinted redaction of the evening’s events; instead, I peered out of the window at the Manhattan skyline. I’d been to the city before, on field trips to the Museum of History; plus, every year my mother, sister and I, together with our neighbor and her two kids, went to see the Rockettes at the Radio City Christmas Show. Those visits had taken place during daylight, when Manhattan was a cauldron of clattering subway cars, honking horns, blaring sirens, congested sidewalks, putrefying garbage, the rich aromas of vending-cart meals and pastries baking in restaurant kitchens. But at night – and from a distance – the city’s rococo light show made its inanimate inhabitants come alive. The night exposes Manhattan’s might and its frailty, presents it in unvarnished form for inspection. The midnight sun of neon and fluorescence bleaches out the shadows and the grays, throwing the city’s skeletal form into razor-sharp relief. It’s at night that its saw tooth outline stands proudest against the sky, blocking out the horizon; its spaghetti tangle of roads seem most like a racetrack without beginning or end; its light-festooned bridges seem like a warm greeting and a fine send-off to the perpetual ebb and flow of humanity that is its heartbeat. It felt terribly grown-up to be driving around the city at night. It was a feature of that particular day, together with treating Carnegie Hall as my own private playground, that has never dimmed in my memory.

With the coming of the following day, I expected things to be forever different, as Capote had assured us they would be. But I didn’t know what, precisely, my new life would be like. How dancing at Carnegie Hall would change my breakfasts, my mornings, my days at school. I anxiously waited to see what would happen. That first day post-C.H. was a Sunday, strangely like most other Sundays. No one called; no one treated me, or the day, as special. I was disappointed; I was puzzled. But I was also relieved. Alexia and I spent the day playing up in the attic – same old same old wasn’t such a terrible thing after all. Memoir, "The Continent of Ruby," available at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TT5DDWO