“But, my dear boy, that’s what he’s paid for. He will have to make an accusation soon or the city will be angry with him. That’s the price of office.”
“I think he suspects me.”
“Now don’t be melodramatic. Of course he doesn’t.”
“I don’t mean of the murder, but … well, of being connected with it. My story about finding what is officially known as The Murder Weapon just didn’t go down. He knows it was left some place else.”
“You don’t think …” My employer looked alarmed.
“I just don’t know.” And we left it at that.
On the way back to the office, I stopped off at Eglanova’s Fifty-second Street apartment. She had invited me to come see her and I knew that she was always at home to those she liked, which was almost anyone who would pay a call on her.
She had the whole second floor of a brownstone to herself; it had been her home for twenty years and, consequently, it seemed now like a room from a Chekhov play: Czarist Russian in every untidy detail, even to the bronze samovar and the portraits of the Czar and Czarina, signed, on the piano, a grand affair, covered with an antique lace shawl and decorated with several more silver-framed photographs, of Karsavina, Nijinski and Pavlova. “They are my family,” Eglanova was accustomed to say to casual visitors, waving her long sinewy hand at the photographs, including the Russian Royal Family as well as the dancers. Over the mantel was the famous painting of Eglanova in Giselle, her greatest moment in the theater … 1918.
Her maid opened the door and, without comment, ushered me into the presence.
“It is Peter!” Eglanova, wearing an old wrapper, sat by the bay window near the piano, looking out at a bleak little garden in the back where one sick tree grew among the tin cans and torn newspapers. She put down the copy of Vogue she was reading and gave me her hand. “Come sit by me and keep me company.”
I sat down in a papier mâché Victorian chair and she said something in Russian to her maid who appeared, a moment later, from the kitchen with two ordinary drinking glasses full of hot tea and lemon. “It is just right thing for hot day,” said Eglanova and we toasted each other gravely. Then she offered me some candy, rich creamy chocolates which made me sick just looking at them. “All boys like candy,” she said emphatically. “You sick maybe? or drink too much? American boys drink too much.”
I agreed to that all right … if anything causes this great civilization of ours to fall flat on its face it will be the cocktail party. I thought of those eighteenth-century prints of Rowlandson and Gilray and Hogarth, all the drunken mothers and ghastly children wallowing in gin in the alleys … it makes you stop and think. I thought longingly for several seconds of a gin and tonic.
“I couldn’t take class again today … too hot. I perish.” Contrary to vulgar legend the lives of great ballerinas are not entirely given up to a few minutes of graceful movement every night followed by champagne drunk out of their toeshoes till dawn, in the company of financiers … no, most of their time is spent in filthy rehearsal halls, inhaling dust, or else in class, daily, year in year out, practicing, practicing even after they are already prima ballerinas. It occured to me, suddenly, irrelevantly, that Eglanova was the same age as my mother.
“I think Jane Garden is taking class this afternoon.”
“Such darling girl! I hear she is your petite amie. So good for both of you.”
“Oh sure … it’s wonderful.” News travels fast, I thought.
“I’m so happy to see good children happy. Every night?”
“What?” for a moment I didn’t understand; then I blushed. “Except on Wednesday, I guess, when she’s too tired.”
“Just like me!” Eglanova laughed, a wonderful deep peasant laugh. “My husband Alexey Kuladin (he was prominent lawyer in Russia before) could never understand about Wednesday … I tell him about matinee but he would say: what difference?” She chuckled; we drank tea and Eglanova asked me more questions about what Jane and I did and what my habits had been previous to our affair. I told her a number of stories, mostly true, and she loved them. She was like one of those old women you read about who brood over an entire village and are never shocked no matter what happens … good witches. She made everything seem completely natural which, of course, it is or should be … she even regarded Louis with delight. “Where does he get the energy? where?” I had just told her about my run-in with him. “He works hard most of the day and at performance. Then he goes out and he drinks, oh, like an American, or maybe Russian … then he picks up one tough boy; then maybe another later on, not counting the people in the theater. It is wonderful! Such vitality! So manly!”
I wasn’t convinced of the manly end of it but then it all depends on how you look at such things … he certainly acts like a man and there may be, who knows, not much difference between nailing a boy to the bed and treating a girl in like manner; it’s all very confusing and I intend one day to sit down and figure the whole thing out. It’s like that poem of Auden’s, one of whose quatrains goes:
Louis is telling Anne what Molly
Said to Mark behind her back;
Jack likes Jill who worships George
Who has the hots for Jack.
Kind of flip but the legend of our age. Anyway, it may all be a matter of diet.
Eglanova wolfed down a couple of chocolates; I tried to recall if she were married at the moment but when I attempted straightening out in my mind the various marriages and divorces and widowhoods, some known and others suspected, I found I could not remember even half the names, mostly Russian ones, of her husbands and protectors … as they used to call boyfriends in the wicked days before the First World War.
“She will be lovely dancer,” said Eglanova, her mouth full of chocolate.
“Jane? I think so, too.”
“She is warm … here.” Eglanova touched her liver, the source, she said, of a woman’s deepest emotion. A man’s was somewhere south of the liver and much less reliable as a center of intensity and artistic virtue.
“Do you like her in Eclipse?”
“Very much. So strong. Is bad ballet of course.”
“Bad?”
“Very bad. Just tricks. We do all those things in nineteen twenty. We groan and suffer on stage for not enough love. We act like machines. We did everything then. Now American boys think it modern. Ha!” She gestured scornfully, sweeping the copy of Vogue off onto the floor.
“When did you see it?”
“Last night only … I was in final ballet so I went around front.”
“Sutton did it well, too.”
Eglanova’s face darkened. “Such tragedy!” she murmured intensely.
“The funeral was pretty awful.”
“Disgusting! Miles is fool!”
“I guess he was too broken up to make much sense about the arrangements.”
“Broken up? But why? He loathed her.”
“Still … it’s a terrible thing to have happen.”
“Ah!” She looked menacing. “If ever woman needed murder she did. But Miles was fool.”
“Why?”
Eglanova shrugged. “How can he get away? It is so obvious. I know … you know … they, the public, know.”
“But why don’t the police arrest him?”
She spread her hands, yellow diamonds gleamed in dusty settings. “It is like ballet. You go slow. You introduce themes. Male solo. Female solo. Ensemble. Pas de deux. They know what they must do.”
This unexpected coldness was too much for me. “You sound as if you want him to be found out.”