Chapter 1
The Master came into my life like the dusk. Slowly, until all the city was covered in night. And I, a star waiting to burn.
It was winter, or nearly so, the cold before the snow when the air goes still around you and inside of you. The radiator in my little room in the boardinghouse was shaky at best and I shivered getting dressed, frost in the corners of the window. With the heel of my hand I wiped away the condensation, an unchanging view of the brick alley beyond. Though it was early I had eaten already—eggs and toast with margarine—but still my belly rumbled because it was not enough and never would be.
My breath quickly misted the glass again; I stepped away. Nine years into the economic depression and my basic needs were met, even if this was the coldest of rooms in the creakiest boardinghouse on the North Side of Chicago. Granted, the matron, Mrs. O’Donnell, served us more for dinner than most: baked beans with cornbread and Hoover stew. Dandelion salad, and potato pancakes, and potato soup. Boiled carrots and spaghetti, cabbage and dumplings—all of it fine, though none of it appealing. I knew I was fortunate, I did; and yet, even the guilt of ingratitude was not enough to banish my growing discontent.
This can’t be all there is.
I was thinking of running away forever when there was a knock on my bedroom door.
I had made it part of my routine every morning, imagining how I would manage it: out the window, down the alley, through the park. Hurrying, but not so fast as to appear suspicious, or as if I were going anywhere in particular. Hair up, no wind, a half-melted moon in the dim afternoon guiding me toward the open water, the lake like one long shadow. There I would wade into the water and the waves would carry me to another world entirely—to a place I had never been, and from which I would not be able to find my way back again. Or, at the very least, to a crack in this world, a place where magic coats everything like a layer of dust, where the wind smells sweet and night never comes. A place that has no edges and no end, where there is always more. More life, more light, more to see, and more to explore.
It was the fantasy of a little girl. A girl I had not been for some time and of course never would be again. One that still had a mother who would stop her if she tried to leave; one that still had the whole world open to her, and dwelled in that sacred place before a perfect, cherished dream became a less than satisfying reality. For years in the company of Near North Ballet, I’d been another girl in a row of perfect girls, another face, another body in a line of similar faces and bodies. Symmetry and seamlessness, every step and angle of the chin; every curve of the arm and lift of the leg, precisely the same as the girls in front and behind. After a while I’d begun to feel as if I’d run eagerly, wildly into a labyrinth of possibility only to find that it was instead a straight aisle, pressed among a crowd of equally eager girls all trying to unlock the same door at the end of this infinite corridor.
And so, stuck in one place, growing stagnant and unsure, a new dream had been born: If I couldn’t dance the way I wanted to—ecstatically, with all eyes on me—I would run. As long as I was still in motion, my heart would keep beating, and nothing, not even death, could touch me.
More. There has to be more.
“Coming!” I called, as another knock came at the door, louder and more insistent. I turned from the window and hurried to pull on my favorite pale pink dress for church: the last dress my mother had ever made for me, a gift on the day I turned thirteen. A little worn around the seams, and tight across the chest, but seven years later it still fit, and I would wear it for seven years more as long as it didn’t fall apart. I tugged on my stockings, hoping the tiny rip near the hip wouldn’t reach my knees and become visible to judging eyes. Sunday was the only day of the week I wore my hair down, shadow-black and falling in bouncy spirals well past my shoulders, much longer than Mamma ever used to let me keep it. Finally I slipped
on my brown penny loafers and went to the door.
“Mistress is here.” It was Emilia, slightly breathless even though she stood absolutely still, her dark hair set in pins to curl. It was still half an hour before we would leave for church and she was never early for anything without a pressing reason. “She asked to see you right away. She’s waiting in the parlor.”
My heart gave a vicious kick.
“What do you think she wants?” It was barely a whisper. We looked at each other, and both of us knew, but neither wanted to say it in case it didn’t come true. The prima position—Emilia’s position—would be open soon, and though it was all anyone in the corps could talk about, I had refused even to think of it, as if my own hope was a monster that would turn me to stone if I slipped and looked it directly in the eye. I wanted the position; I burned with the wanting, the sun in my throat, and maybe that was the true reason I had not run away yet: There was still something to wish for. Prima ballerina of Near North Ballet. It was utterly impossible—and right within reach.
“To demand that you dance for her morning, noon, and night,” Emilia said in that way she had of teasing while also being perfectly serious. “So that she’ll never have to live for even one second without gazing upon your unparalleled grace and beauty.”
I smiled, but it was more for her sake than for mine. Was it the touch of destiny I felt then, or was it simply nerves pinching in? Of
late Mistress reprimanded me more than anyone else in the corps, barking my name as she clapped her hands once, sharply, so that we stopped in a flurry, the music cutting out. She ordered us back to the beginning of the phrase each time I strayed even slightly out of formation, each time I smiled a little more widely than the others, or spun just a smidgen too quickly. It was a failure, she’d admonished, to stand out from the corps. Weakness, not strength, to draw the eye to only one part of the whole.
But, if I were a soloist, I would be a whole unto myself. Never again would I need to blend in.
And so I could think of no other reason for her visit but that she was about to promote me—or to fire me for my mistakes. There was, after all, another, perhaps more obvious choice, than me: Beatrice Lang, whose upper middle class family had enrolled her in ballet lessons practically the moment she’d learned to walk. Despite the war and the depression, she’d never known a day of wanting or weeping, of hunting for dandelion greens in the park to cook into a sauce, or watching her veteran father gamble away his meager savings. Sometimes I wondered if we lived in the same city at the same time at all, or if she had crossed from some other reality into our own, so far removed was she from the life I had known. Tall, and with hair so fair it shone almost white in the stage light, she was delicate in demeanor but powerful in execution, possessed of that elusive gravity we called presence. An ability that had never come easily to me, the radiation of an undeniable energy that turned eyes toward her as soon as she entered a room. She was very much like Emilia in that way, and so seemed Emilia’s natural successor. As I thought of this my smile slipped, a short-lived thing, and Emilia must have seen. She took my hand, as gently as lifting a sculpted angel made of glass, and said, “Come, Grace. I’ll walk with you.”
The hallway was narrow and there wasn’t much light, an electric bulb protruding from the ceiling every few feet. The stairwell was even darker, and though we were forced to descend single file, I never let go of Emilia’s hand. Between the thick walls of exposed brick our footsteps echoed like the whispers of a growing crowd around a crime scene. Halfway down, I squeezed her hand and stopped. She stopped too, turning toward me with a question posed on her lips, but before she could ask it I threw my arms around her, hugging her tightly.
“What was that for?” she said, laughing, as I released her. I stood one stair above her, and she seemed so small as I looked down, even though on level ground we were precisely the same height.
“I’m going to miss you,” I said. “That’s all.”
Emilia was leaving in the spring to get married, to make a home and start a family. Though I’d had plenty of time now to get used to
the idea, my throat still burned the way it had the day she’d told me, as if I were inhaling shadows instead of air. Emilia was the only family I had now, the only family I’d had for the last seven years. Was there a place for me in her new life, or would I linger like a splinter stuck deep into her palm, and it was only a matter of time before her protective skin pushed me out, the thing that didn’t belong? I began to miss her, even while she was still right there in front of me.
“Not so fast,” Emilia said as we stood in the stairwell, the ache of her imminent absence even more pronounced. “You’re not rid of me yet.”
She took my hand firmly and led the way again, our footsteps slightly heavier than they were before. Two floors down and we emerged into a much brighter corridor, the walls here papered in forcefully cheery stripes and the floor carpeted in soft beige that swallowed our footfalls. A smell of burnt coffee, strong enough to choke. At the end of the corridor was a closed door, looming like the entrance to the underworld. My heart seemed separated from my body somehow, its mad, mortal beat in my ears belonging to someone else. A monster, maybe. It was like that when I stepped onstage too. I became the tiniest bit inhuman.
Emilia stopped before the door and turned to me. “All right, let me look at you.”
I stood at attention while she fluffed my hair, raking her thin hands through my curls, and then pinched my cheeks to coax a rosy glow to the surface. When Emilia was satisfied she took a step back and nodded.
“I’ll wait here,” she promised. “Just outside.”
The thought of her presence—even on the other side of the door—calmed me. But only slightly.
As if sensing us standing there, a voice came through the door, a voice like a gray cloud holding on to its lightning for just a minute more. “My colombina, is that you? Come in.”
“Well,” I said, and could think of nothing else to say or do but to face whatever awaited me.
“Merde,” Emilia said as I turned away: the wish of good luck that was usually reserved for the stage. I nodded once, then twisted the heavy doorknob and stepped into the parlor.
Though Mrs. O’Donnell was the matron, it was Mistress, in fact, who owned the boardinghouse. It used to be her home, before she’d moved elsewhere—I’m not sure where, as she never invited any of us over—and began renting out the rooms in order to keep her dancers close to the studio. And so, when I entered the musty parlor, I marveled as always at Mistress’s taste—or lack thereof—in décor, the room replete with several faded chintz chairs and long gray curtains obscuring the windows, catching and killing the
sunlight before it could trespass. It smelled old. It was old—the house had been built fifty years ago, in the 1880s. Now, in 1938, it was all rotted wood and mothballs, mildew and dust. Mrs. O’Donnell burned scented candles but it only enhanced the stench, not banished it.
Mistress sat in a chair with her back to the window, dressed in a navy tunic-top dress belted at the waist, a matching tilt hat resting in her lap. As always, her long, graying auburn hair was twisted on top of her head. She was much older than she looked, her back straight and her chin held high. When she danced she moved like moonlight—precise, direct, but still with an air of otherworldliness about her, of night. Not that she danced much anymore; she was at least sixty—though she never did complain of aches and pains—and she had a company to direct—a severely underfunded one. It was rumored she’d had a steady patron twenty or so years ago—back when her daughter, also a dancer, was still with the company—but either he had left to apply his patronage elsewhere, or he’d lost all his money in 1929 when the stock markets first took a severe tumble. Either way, I suspected that now it was only through the sheer force of her will that Near North Ballet still functioned at all—her fists clenched around it, her refusal to let go.
She managed her dancers in much the same manner.
“Close the door behind you,” she said to me, and I obeyed. The latch clicked like teeth, a hard bite. “Sit.”
I sat across from her, my stomach roilling. Sometimes, after a long day of rehearsals, fresh bloodstains in our shoes, the other girls and I would whisper behind our hands, calling her a harpy, a witch who wanted to bathe in our blood and steal our youth. But all the while I knew she wasn’t a witch, not the way we meant it, because heroes and villains did not exist in life as they did in stories.
Here there were only those who smiled when they said something kind, and those who smiled when they said something cruel.
Mistress was both.
“Colombina, how are you sleeping?” she said, and my heart spun in my chest, tripped, and fell flat. Just tell me why you’re here. “Are you eating well?”
She knew I ate as well or as badly as anyone else in the company—as anyone in Chicago, for that matter—and sleep was parallel to a miracle when it came without a fight.
“Yes, Mistress,” I said, staring at the pinched skin of her neck instead of her eyes. I wondered if Mistress’s daughter—whose name I didn’t know because Mistress rarely spoke of her—had ever felt like this beneath her mother’s gaze, pinned like prey. I’d never met the daughter, or seen her, and I didn’t know where she was now, if she was dancing for another company—which had possibly caused the rift between her and Mistress—or if, like Emilia, she had retired to start a family. Did Mistress have a nickname for her daughter like she had one for me? No other girl currently in the company could say the same, and I clung to this, that I alone was Mistress’s colombina. That though she had been cross with me lately, I was still special, still deserving of my place.
There is always my little window, I thought, reassuring myself in case things were about to go terribly wrong. Out the window, down the alley, through the park. No matter what happens, this is not the end.
“Look at me.” Mistress leaned toward me, a cup of steaming coffee in her hands.
I raised my gaze, trying to keep my face blank. “It’s very important we keep you in perfect condition, now that you’re rising from the corps.”
I inhaled so sharply that I almost choked. “I’m…?”
“Yes. Can you believe it?” Mistress said, watching me keenly. “Grace Dragotta, prima ballerina assoluta.”
Prima ballerina assoluta. It was like she had cast an enchantment, and for a full minute I could say nothing, do nothing, d
isplay no reaction at all. I was dizzy, more so even than when I’d stood at the top of the Tribune Tower with my older brother, Lorenzo, beside me—Come on, gotta surprise for you, bearcat. How’d ya like to touch the sky?—and gazed down at the city below for the very first time, as high as I had ever been or would be again. I had come so far, I had worked so hard; but still the moment held an air of unreality, a second of lucidity in a dream when you look around and think, No, none of this is happening.
“You haven’t said a word.” Mistress set her coffee on the low table between us. It clinked against the glass. “Your evident surprise at this is almost insulting. Are you not my colombina? My sweet, shy bird? You flew through my window, and I did more than mend your broken wings. I gave you new wings, bigger and better, stronger, so you could soar higher, faster, so you could tear through the night and bring me back stars.” She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, startling me with the sudden, staccato sound. “Haven’t I molded you into the proud ballerina you are today? Haven’t I shaped you into the beautiful young woman I see before me? Why shouldn’t the artist responsible for such a transformation be rewarded for her fine work? Answer me.”
“I never doubted you, Mistress,” I said quickly, and it was true. Only overwhelmed, I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. In the end I did neither—Mistress loathed strong emotions, claiming they
only belonged on the stage. I settled on a smile, not too wide, and I showed no teeth. “I’m honored. Truly.”
Mollified, Mistress sat back with a sigh. “There’s more, colombina. Would you like to hear it?”
“Yes,” I said, and concentrated very hard on not scratching an imaginary itch in the corner of my eye, or picking at the skin around my nails. Mistress didn’t take kindly to fidgeting either—one’s movements should always be deliberate, she said. “Please, tell me.”
“You will be dancing the Golden Firebird this season.”
This time I couldn’t hide my bewildered delight, and I covered my cheeks with my hands to obscure at least some of it, the flush that had risen to my face. The Golden Firebird was the lead role of The Firebird, the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s breakthrough ballet. As far as I knew, it had not been performed in America yet, but was regarded overseas as a masterpiece. It was the story of a prince named Ivan and the Firebird he finds in the forest that helps him rescue thirteen sleeping princesses from the clutches of the sorcerer Koschei the Deathless and his scheming demons. A pure fairy tale, with good triumphing over evil and true love conquering all.
“But…Emilia…” I said, still trying to wrap my mind around all of this. It was true that she was leaving, but she had not left yet. “This is her farewell season. Shouldn’t she dance the lead one last time?”
“Are you the ballet mistress here, or am I?” Mistress sounded as close to amused as I’d ever heard her, exasperated but not angry. “Miss Menendez will serve as your understudy, in case something goes wrong.”
A deep coldness swept through me, hardening in the spaces between my bones.
“Goes wrong?” I echoed, my voice as small as a child’s.
“Yes, well, you could fall and break your neck on the stairs, or suffer some other hideous disaster.” Mistress’s gaze drifted toward the window. “If it makes you feel better, your friend will be featured prominently, as always. The role of Princess Ekaterina will suit her just fine.”
I nodded, relieved. She did believe in me, but of course, every prima has an understudy. And the princess was the next best role—some would even argue that it was equal to the Firebird. So really, there was no reason to feel guilty about pushing Emilia out early. Her farewell season would still be a great one, perhaps even her best yet.
Mistress took a slow sip of her coffee.
“You look worried,” she said, eyeing me over the rim of her cup. “Don’t be. I have known that same fear of center stage, even while
longing with all my soul for it. Stars burn—and burn out. Sometimes the fire is slow to consume and sometimes it happens quickly—too quickly, and your career is over. The dance is done. It’s frightening, but there is no stopping it once it has begun.” She leaned across the space between us and put two fingers beneath my chin, a light tap, before letting her hand fall away. “But if you must burn, colombina, why not burn the brightest?”
She had misinterpreted my anxiety over Emilia, and I inhaled a breath to explain, but then decided against it. I simply nodded, smiling a little as if her words had soothed me, when really the opposite of what she thought I was feeling was true: If anything, I feared not burning, of staying still with my feet stuck to the ground.
“Thank you, Mistress,” I said at last, and though I meant it with all my heart, the words felt insignificant. “Thank you for trusting me with this position, and this role.”
“Well deserved, little bird,” she said, and with that I was dismissed. I stood and left the room, forcing myself to move at a normal pace. I felt Mistress’s eyes on me, and tried very hard not to tremble beneath that dissecting gaze.
The hallway was darker than when I’d been there before, the shadows thinner and longer. Emilia waited right where she said she would be. She took my elbow and guided me back to the stairwell where Mistress would not overhear us, my steps so light it was almost like floating.
“Prima?” she whispered, when we were sure we were alone. Her eyes were bright like a beginning, like once upon a time. “Is it you?”
“It’s me,” I whispered, and suddenly it was real; it wasn’t just a dream. Joy filled me like midday light touching every corner of a room. No longer would I be another faceless girl in the corps; after all, wasn’t it my inimitability that had first gotten me noticed? Seven years ago I’d been brave enough to enter Mistress’s studio and ask for what I wanted: to learn and to grow under her wing. I would burn, burn the brightest, and in burning become untouchable; no hand of god or man could hope to hold me down.
“Oh, Grace, I’m so happy for you.” Emilia embraced me, closing the space between us so suddenly that I was nearly knocked off my feet. A laugh escaped me, a high, girlish sound. “I knew you would get it—I just knew.”
I smiled, though Emilia couldn’t see as she continued to cling tightly to me. Maybe Beatrice had been the conventional choice for Emilia’s replacement, but I was special too—and this promotion was the proof. More like the moon than the sun, bright and a little strange, a touch of mystique that made you marvel at it night after night. Beatrice was bold and exciting, but I was ethereal, haunting,
and mine was the performance the audience would remember long after it was done, lingering.
“I couldn’t have done it without you,” I said, thinking of all those long hours we’d spent in the studio after dark, Emilia acting as a second mistress to my instruction. At thirteen years old I’d been sorely behind the other girls in the ballet school, a thin, tired orphan who’d had no formal training in her childhood. Emilia had been a patient teacher, gently if relentlessly adjusting my legs and feet until I’d achieved near perfect turnout, leading me through stretches to expand my extension until I could penché with my leg in a six o’clock arabesque, my toes pointing perfectly to the sky. She watched me execute the same combinations, at the barre and in the center, over and over until I could do a triple pirouette without hopping, land a tour jeté without stumbling, a brisé volé without fumbling. Until Mistress could find little fault with me, and I was ready at last to join the corps.
“Oh, you would’ve gotten there on your own eventually,” Emilia said modestly, and when she pulled away I saw that she was crying, just a little. She wiped her eyes, and as soon as hers were gone I felt the tears start in mine, as if we could only express emotion one at a time, passing it between us like shared food at a table, drinking from the same cup.
“I’m not so sure about that,” I said, and sudden footsteps at the top of the stairs made us both jump. A moment later Beatrice and her close friend Anna, who was also in the corps, appeared above us, ...
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