The Short History of a Prince by Jane Hamilton Page A

floor started to turn around and around to the song “I Can Show You the World,” tottering on half-pointe, their arms overhead in the shape of diamonds, rather than the elongated classical ovals, Walter clenched his teeth and gripped the chair. It was going to take all of his strength to prevent himself from scooping up Linda, chasing away, kidnapping her from her life of plenty and horror.
    “Lucy,” he nonetheless found himself saying out of his closed mouth. “Lucy.” Classical ballet was the last fruit of Renaissance art. It began in the fourteenth century and came through Russian imperialism into the twentieth century. Imagine if the masters, if Petipa or Fokine had been able to anticipate Linda and all her cohorts and Melissa crucifying the form. “If I had seen this in the future, when I was thirteen,” he muttered, “I would have slit my wrists.”
    She had no idea that he was really overwrought. “Sourpuss,” she murmured lovingly.
    Walter again turned to gaze at her. She had their mother’s slender nose and hazel eyes. Her light brown hair was pulled back in a pony-tail, her application of pink lipstick still holding. She was lovely, small-boned,a lightweight girl Marc picked up and spun around. She was happy with her job in customer service at the bank, happy watching her daughter doing what was expected of her, along with her Schaumburg neighbors. Linda, too, might grow up to have run-of-the-mill desires, reasonable expectations. He had watched her only a week before at Lake Margaret, asleep in a bed that used to be his. He had admired the sweaty sheen of her sleeping face. He’d kneeled at her side to look at the line of her eye, the white mother-of-pearl, showing under her slightly open lid. For an instant he believed he might, through that small thin line of white, see into her dreams. It was possible that like her mother she would aspire to a job, central air, a deck out back. There were moments when Walter felt wonder at the feat of his own sister’s normalcy. It was so far beyond his notion of average. She and her husband were average to a marvelous exponential power. Lucy and Marc were like a skating pair, all made up, with matching satin outfits, sequined bodices, hair sprayed, in place, always in place, zigging and zagging over the ice, doing their synchronized moves, glowing, smiling, arms up, waving.
    Lucy leaned over and patted him on the shoulder. “Maybe it’s just not all that it’s cracked up to be, Walt, to feel tortured so much of the time.”
    He had taken her to see Swan Lake , starring Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov at the Civic Opera House in Chicago, when she was eight years old. He would have liked to shout at her, to remind her of it, over the noise of “I Can Show You the World.” “I don’t feel tortured all the time,” he said. “I’m one of the happier people I know, except for, maybe, Kathie Lee. I’m not as happy as Kathie Lee, but almost, Lucy, almost.”
    She laughed and slapped her hip. “Wait! Just wait until I tell Marc that one.”
    Walter began to say that it wouldn’t hurt her to experience a bad day, that a brief depression would do her good. He bit his tongue. At thirty-five she would probably succumb, and he feared that she would have nothing, no good words, no music except Kenny Loggins’s lullaby CD, for guidance. He looked out to the dance floor, to Linda, already cursed by her dull name. She was standing, frowning, while all the other girls tried to follow Melissa’s combination. She lookedsmall and bewildered. He wanted to go to her and whisper into her ear, offer her a pink-and-white swirling sucker, a new bike, a dollhouse, anything, so that she’d know it was all right, that life wasn’t always like this moment, standing in the middle of the dance floor, standing, while everyone else breezed past. But it happens sometimes, he’d say, and believe it or not a person learns to make use of the loneliness.
    Walter turned to his