Guests on Earth (27 page)

“I shall need eight dancers,” she said, “to comprise nine, along with myself, for nine is the powerful number, the number which is required for this dance. Three, you see—all multiples: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. For He is life. Time is life, and He is time. Got it?”

We nodded stupidly.

“Excellent. We must begin immediately, this afternoon.” It was a transformation. Mrs. Fitzgerald looked calm yet purposeful, eyes snapping with an energy I had not seen since her return. Even her body looked different. Feet apart, weight evenly balanced on each, she stood lightly in the world now, ready for anything. Ready to dance.

“It’s too soon,” Phoebe told her. “We have to round up your dancers. How about day after tomorrow? That’ll be Saturday afternoon, so they can probably all come.”

“As you wish. But tell them they should come prepared to dance. Wear something comfortable.” With a dismissive wave, Mrs. Fitzgerald exited.

Phoebe and I looked at each other.

What had we done?

Y
ET THE FIRST
p
ractice went surprisingly well, though only seven dancers showed up. “Don’t worry, we’ve got another coming next time,” promised Dr. Schwartz, who was present, too. I was very glad to have her and Phoebe there, and Karen Quinn as well, who had asked to perform, as she loved modern dance herself. “Though it has been years,” she confessed ruefully, large and very strong-looking in her green leotard and tights. Her feet were huge, bare, and very white. The others included my housemates, Myra, Amanda, Ruth, and Jinx, of course, the most enthusiastic of all—plus a shy new girl named Pauletta, and Mrs. Morris’s oldest daughter Nancy, a high school girl who had been taking ballet lessons in town for several years.

“First we shall limber up.” Mrs. Fitzgerald nodded to me and I began to play some little études as background music. “Just follow me.” She led them in a series of stretches, up, down, forward, side to side, in time to the music. It all looked surprisingly professional to me. But why not? Mrs. Fitzgerald had told me herself that she was once asked to join the San Carlo Ballet Company in Naples and offered a solo role in Aida, though she had refused, to her eternal regret. Down in the front row, I could see Dr. Schwartz begin to relax as well. Mrs. Fitzgerald sank gracefully to the floor, where the exercises continued, then ended with the girls all sitting cross-legged in a semicircle, Ruth and Myra breathing hard.

“This don’t look like any ballet dance I ever saw,” Jinx announced. “When do we get to jump up and leap through the air?”

Everybody laughed.

Mrs. Fitzgerald rose to stand before us all. “This will not be, strictly speaking, a ballet, my dears.” She was still composed. “It is, rather, an interpretive dance, a very famous dance, about the nature of time. You will form a circle, for you shall be Time itself—the minutes, the hours—and the music will tell the passing of the day from morning till night, or of a human lifetime, by extrapolation.”

“By what?” Jinx asked.

“Extension,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said. “Imagination. Use your imagination. I know you’ve got one. Play it for us, Evalina”—which I did, noting their immediate smiles. I knew it would make them happy.

“So. You will come in first and form a great circle, which will turn and turn . . .”

“Ecclesiastes,” Jinx said.

This remark stopped Mrs. Fitzgerald in her tracks. Then she smiled—that lovely and rare occurrence. “Exactly, my dear! Just exactly! Now let’s try it. Go offstage there, and come in like this, in a line, but see the step? Watch the step, you over there. Now you’re gliding, you’re gliding, now form the circle, now let’s go around—and around and around”—as I played.

“Now I want you to split up into groups of three. You girls over there—and you three in the center, come forward a bit, please—and the rest come over here, that’s right. Now we shall learn a little routine, a sequence of steps and movements. Evalina!” I played. “Again.” I played again as she performed the routine three times, then made a turn. But now Mrs. Fitzgerald seemed short of breath, and for the first time, I realized that I could see her age—forty-eight—which she must have been feeling, too, because she stopped suddenly and pointed to Jinx, saying, “Here, dear, why don’t you come up and lead, while I help the others individually?

Without a word, Jinx went forward and performed the steps flawlessly, as I played the spritely tune again and again while Mrs. Fitzgerald moved from group to group, instructing—reaching down to point Amanda’s toe, pulling Myra’s shoulders back so she would stand up straight, telling Ruth to be quiet. Jinx led them as if she’d been doing it for years, again and again, until Mrs. Fitzgerald clapped her hands three times and said, “Enough! Very, very good work, girls. Now you may go. Though I want you to practice, practice, practice on your own, the little routine which you have just learned. Practice before a mirror, if possible.” It would not be possible in most of the hospital. “If you get lost, ask that one,” pointing to Jinx, who nodded solemnly. “And I shall meet with you again on—” She looked out at her little audience.

“Monday at five o’clock,” Phoebe Dean called out. “One hour before supper. Here.”

The dancers came down off the stage and milled around, finding their belongings and putting on their coats; their chatter filled the auditorium. They had ceased to be patients; they could have been any young women, anywhere. I closed the piano, gathered up my music, and stepped off the stage to join the rest. Finally the girls began trooping up the aisle, followed by Mrs. Fitzgerald, who paused to address Phoebe and Dr. Schwartz. “So, what did you think of the rehearsal? Some promise here, I’d say, especially the little redhead.”

“Oh yes,” we all gushed, and that fleeting smile appeared on Mrs. Fitzgerald’s face again.

“You, Patricia,” she said, pointing at me now, “are fine. You are wasted upon us. And now, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost . . .” she murmured as she continued up the aisle alone.

“Hey Zelda,” Jinx’s flat carrying voice came suddenly from the dark at the back of the auditorium, “you wanna smoke?”

And then they both were gone.

D
R.
S
CHWARTZ AND
I
followed more slowly, Phoebe and Karen staying to straighten up and turn out the lights.

“You know what I wish?” I said, on impulse, turning to Dr. Schwartz. “I would give anything if Dixie could be here, if she could be in this dance, too. She would just love it, wouldn’t she?”—as Dixie had such a gift for fun. “I miss her so much. Have you heard from her at all? Because I haven’t, not a word. I don’t understand it. I keep thinking about her.”

Dr. Schwartz hesitated, looking down. Finally she put her hand on my arm. “It’s so strange that you would mention Dixie to me right now. You are very, very perceptive, Evalina—maybe you’re psychic or something.” She smiled to show me that she was just kidding. “Because the fact is that Dixie has been upstairs in the Central Building for some time now, but tomorrow she will be moving down to the second floor, and urged to participate in the life of the hospital again. So she might well be one of the ‘hours’ in this performance, if she wants to. In fact, we have saved the last spot for her, just in case. This was my own little secret. She can start on Monday. What do you think of that?”

I gave Dr. Schwartz a hug. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” I said—my first reaction. But of course I knew it wasn’t wonderful for Dixie. “What happened, though? She looked so happy when she left for Christmas. So did Frank—remember?”

“The short answer is, we don’t know what happened. And we may never know. All we can do is treat the illness, which is depression, as best we know how. And our knowledge is very limited, pitifully limited.”

“But you would think,” I pursued, “on the face of it, that she’s got everything—a husband who loves her, two children who love her—and she’s rich, too. She can go back to college like Richard said. She can do anything she wants or have anything she wants—except get that baby back, I guess. Do you think that’s the problem?”

“I think it may have been a factor, certainly, but most people get over such loss, or grief, or even traumas we can’t imagine. In fact most people will experience periods of depression in their lifetimes, and then they will get better eventually. There is the question of the body, which insists upon life—the organism itself wants to get better—the body always chooses life.”

“So you’re saying that Dixie—”

“I’m saying that the problem is that there’s no problem. No single cause. That question is not even relevant when we are dealing with clinical depression. This is what people don’t understand. Nobody understands it—especially not the relatives, or the people that love them, like Frank Calhoun. Everybody keeps thinking that there’s a reason, something that can be changed, something that can be fixed, and then the patient will be fixed, too. I’m saying that Dixie suffers from recurrent bouts of immobilizing clinical depression—a serious illness which we know virtually nothing about, except that there seems to be a genetic component. It does run in families. Someday medical science will learn much, much more about it. But personally I believe that some particular chemical is missing in the brain—rather like diabetes—and that once we figure out what it is, perhaps we can replace it. For now, all we can do is tranquilize them to take the edge off their pain, give them a more orderly routine for a bit, a sympathetic ear and a respite from their own troubling lives, and jumble up their brains in a way we do not really understand, which may be completely irresponsible, for all we know.” She sounded grim.

“Shock treatments,” I said.

“Yes, and Dixie’s got only two weeks to go on them, so there’s no reason she can’t participate in this dance if she wants to,” Dr. Schwartz emphasized. “We’ll see. Anyhow, she’s better.”

So was Mrs. Fitzgerald, clearly, outside sitting on the top step of Homewood’s stone portico, smoking a cigarette and laughing like crazy at something Jinx was telling her. What? I felt a bit jealous. I had known Mrs. Fitzgerald for years, and never had such rapport.

We went down the steps past them.

“You’d better get out of this cold,” Dr. Schwartz called back. “It’s time to go.”

“We will when we finish these smokes,” Jinx hollered out after us. “Bye now.” Though she was the youngest of us all, Jinx treated everybody—even the doctors—as equals.

Then the lights went off abruptly and all we could see of them were the fiery red dots of their cigarettes, glowing in the chilly dark.

F
OR THE FIRST
t
ime, I thought I could feel spring in the air as I left Homewood at the end of the day. It had not snowed for almost a week, and the sun had shone all day long. Despite the continuing cold temperature, patches of grass were emerging everywhere, as rivulets of melting snow coursed down the slope, along the sidewalk. Rehearsal had gone well again, and I realized how much I enjoyed this kind of accompaniment, especially since Dixie had joined us. She struck me as very much her old self, friendly and laughing, interested in each person. Everyone seemed to light up while she was talking to them. No stranger, watching her in conversation, could ever have guessed that Dixie was a hospital patient in the middle of a course of shock treatments for clinical depression. Anyhow, I was overjoyed to have her back among us, as one of the “hours.” If I were not so grown up, I might have skipped down the hill, heading back toward Graystone—while keeping an eye out for Pan, of course, as always, though he was nowhere to be seen.

Instead, I rounded the corner and was surprised by an unfamiliar sight. A big old mud-splattered red truck pulling a silver hump-backed trailer with a long dent in its side, battered but shining in the sun, with yet another, smaller trailer hooked on behind, were parked right in front of our house. These vehicles looked as if they had escaped from the Dust Bowl, or from some Western movie set.

“Evalina?” Suddenly the passenger side door of the truck burst open and here she came running up the sidewalk, Ella Jean in a long leather coat with her black hair swinging below her shoulders, high-heeled cowboy boots slipping on the melting ice. She grabbed me up in a tight fierce hug.

“I can’t believe it,” I said, when I could speak. “Flossie told me you’re a star, and now you even look like one!”

“Flossie—Lord!” Ella Jean rolled her eyes and gave me her jack-o’-lantern grin. “Flossie is crazy as a coot, taking after Mama if you ask me. Still yet, she’s the one that told us you was back up here again, or I never would of knowed it. Told us where you was living, too. Lord, we’ve been about to freeze out here, waiting on you to get back from wherever you been keeping yourself all day.”

Who was us? I looked over her shoulder to see a big, gangly boy wearing a cowboy hat jump out of the driver’s seat, stamping out a cigarette and grinning from ear to ear. He came forward to greet me. “Bucky Pardoe,” he said, “pleased to meetcha.” His name made me laugh because he had the biggest, whitest buck teeth you can possibly imagine, along with straight yellow hair that stuck out from under his cowboy hat like straw. Though Bucky Pardoe was the opposite of handsome, his sky blue eyes were sharp, and I could tell instantly how smart he was. He had a sort of “go get ’em” style.

“I’m Evalina.” I stuck out my gloved hand.

“I know it, honey. I know all about you. That’s why we’re here. “

I looked at Ella Jean.

“Come on along with us,” she said, “and we’ll tell you. Just throw that book bag up on the porch and come on.”

“But don’t you even want to come in and see where I live?” I asked.

“Hell no, we don’t, we want you to come out.” She laughed. “We’ve been driving all night, we’re plumb wore out and now we’re starving to death. We’re going over to Fat Daddy’s and eat us some barbecue. I been telling Bucky how good it is. So you come on with us. You know you want some barbecue.”

I did not hesitate, sticking my bag inside the door without even telling anybody at Graystone where I was going. I ran back down the steps to the truck where Ella Jean had already taken her seat.