The Four Temperaments Read online

  The choreographer for the new ballet stood at the front of the room, a red bandanna tied tightly around his impossibly blond hair. She was willing to bet he bleached it, but since his eyelashes and brows were practically white, she had to give in and assume it was the real thing. First off, he had the corps members stand in a straight line, doing endless bourrées while their outstretched arms tipped in one direction and then the other, so that altogether they resembled a plane about to make a crash landing. Ginny could see their reflections in the big mirror up front, and couldn't believe how stupid they looked. Then she caught sight of Boyd Michaels, way at the other end of the studio. His eyes met hers in the mirror briefly and he smiled.

  The rehearsal dragged on. They jumped around on pointe, arms held in stylized zigzags before and behind their torsos. After twenty minutes or so of this, she felt one blister pop and another start to ooze.

  Finally, they were given a break and Ginny shot out of there to the vending machine, where she bought a Coke and a Mars bar. When she went back inside, she realized that Mia McQuaid was not in the studio. That was strange, because her name was there on the schedule. Ginny had seen it not an hour ago. She walked over to Boyd, who was stretching at the barre.

  “Where's Mia?” she asked, gulping down her Coke. The candy bar was already gone; she wished she'd bought another.

  “Mia McQuaid? Don't you know?” Boyd stopped stretching and turned to face her.

  “Know what?”

  “How she hurt herself. In class this morning.”

  “I wasn't in class this morning,” Ginny said. The Coke can suddenly felt much too cold in her hand and she put it on the floor. “What happened? Is she okay?”

  “If you call ripping the ligament in your knee okay, then I guess she is. But it looks like she'll be out for a while. Maybe even the rest of the season.”

  “That's terrible,” said Ginny. Wes had hurt the ligaments in his knee and it had effectively ended his career. She remembered his telling her how ligaments weren't elastic, like muscles; once you tore one, it never healed right. Then she thought of being in Mia's apartment last night. The mustard. Her face burned at the memory, but Boyd didn't seem to notice.

  “The part's already gone to the understudy,” he was saying.

  “The solo,” murmured Ginny, looking past Boyd to the window on the far side of the studio. “The one I wanted so much.” Abruptly, she turned back to him. “Has anyone started the collection yet?” Whenever a dancer was hurt or injured, all the others took up a collection; no one gave much, just a token, ten dollars, twenty at the most. It was the gesture that counted, the fact that despite their many rivalries and feuds, they would nonetheless rally around one of their own.

  “I'm not sure,” said Boyd. “Why? Do you want to give something? I know you were pretty steamed when she got that part instead of you.” He put his other leg over the barre now. The break was almost over.

  “That doesn't matter,” said Ginny. “Will you take my money? Here.” She handed Boyd five bills—all tens—that she extracted from somewhere inside her dance clothes.

  “Fifty dollars!” said Boyd, smoothing the bills flat in his hand. “That's a lot of money.”

  “Just make sure she gets it, okay?” Ginny answered.

  At the front of the room, Olaf, the choreographer, retied his red bandanna, called all the dancers to join him in the center and then they were at it, oh Lord, again.

  RUTH

  Ruth knew that Oscar was aching to sleep with that girl. That was, if he hadn't done it already. Poor Oscar. Infidelity, or even the thought of it, sat so badly on him. He walked around all hangdog, wringing his hands and looking wretched. This behavior was accompanied by an air of great and unshakable distraction: she had to repeat herself three or four times just to get his attention. No sooner did she do this than he drifted off again, into that private little hell he had furnished, carpeted and made his own. Two weeks ago, she came back from visiting Gabriel, Penelope and the baby in California and found him sitting in the dark by himself in the living room. When she turned on the light, he looked startled, as if she were the last person he expected to see.

  He actually brought her home once, this Ginny Valentine, for dinner. Ruth's first thought was, The poor thing! With those searching eyes and that wide, mobile mouth, her face had an intense, eager and above all needy look. And the clothes: a tight, off-the-shoulder gold lamé top, a floor-length flowered skirt and gold sandals that showed her maimed-looking, somewhat dirty feet. But Ginny had been sweet. She showed up with two bunches of asters from the Korean grocery stand on the corner, smiled her way all through the meal and ate third helpings of everything, although where she put it on that tiny, wiry frame was a mystery to Ruth. She helped clear the table and wanted to wash the dishes, though Ruth drew the line at that. By the end of the evening, Ruth had really warmed to her and even found her somewhat pretty, though she never could have imagined that Oscar would develop such a yen for her. His taste had always run to the refined. Or so she had thought.

  In their many years together, Ruth had had ample opportunity to observe Oscar's little infatuations with the dancers in the company, and the women he selected all seemed to have something in common. There was the blonde who wore tiny diamond earrings and beautiful clothing in subdued shades of ivory, gray and brown; another who had studied music and spoke of it with great intelligence; and still another, a Brazilian woman who wore silk scarves from Hermès and a lush, sensual perfume whose name Ruth never learned. Despite the difference in their looks, they all shared some worldly quality that this child, this waif, seemed light-years away from possessing.

  Yet Ruth was no longer furious with Oscar or jealous of these women. In fact, she had moved through both fury and jealousy and now had achieved something like acceptance. For one thing, with the exception of Ginny Valentine, she didn't believe Oscar ever consummated any of these infatuations; they were loves of the mind rather than of the body. And then there were the children to consider. It was one thing to leave a husband. It was quite another to separate three boys from their father, especially when he had been a good, loving father, as Oscar mostly had been all these years.

  Ruth remembered the night before she and Oscar got married, when she tried on her wedding dress—heavy white satin without a ruffle or stitch of lace on it—for her two grandmothers, Pip and Lilli. Pip was tall and what was called statuesque in those days: she had a full, strong body and elaborately curled hair rinsed in a pale shade of blue. She wore vivid makeup and showy, dramatic clothes, like a pink taffeta dress with a rhinestone-studded bodice or a Persian lamb coat with a faux leopard collar and muff to match. Viennese-born Lilli, who privately thought Pip a bit vulgar, wore white blouses that she boiled on the stove with bleach before starching and ironing them. She never wore lipstick, pants, high heels or any adornment other than her gold wedding ring and the strand of coral beads that came from her mother. Her white hair was worn in thick braids on top of her head, which added a fraction of height to her diminutive frame. Yet despite their differences, these two women converged upon Ruth the night before the wedding ceremony, for a ritual viewing of the dress and to deliver what turned out to be surprisingly similar advice on marriage. Ruth's mother was in the next room, yelling at the caterer or the florist, and so the three of them were alone.

  “Here, take my pin,” urged Pip, unfastening the brooch from her dress. Ruth shook her head no, but Pip persisted. “A pearl necklace, then. Or some earrings. You look naked like that!” Lilli and Ruth exchanged glances but said nothing. Pip caught their looks and misinterpreted them. “Oh, you're thinking she'll be really naked soon enough?” she said, smiling. “That is, if she hasn't already . . . Girls these days don't wait, do they, Lilli? Not like in our day.” Pip shook her head; whether for today's girls or the ones of yesteryear wasn't clear.

  “Not like in our day,” Lilli agreed. She was sitting on a chair in the corner, hands folded over the polished handle of the cane she
had only recently started using. “Girls were different then. It's not just that they waited. They made the men wait,” she explained. “They had that power.” Ruth fingered the heavy material of the dress and looked at the floor, not wanting either of them to try to figure out just what Oscar and she had done up in the Berkshires the summer before. “And power in a marriage, that's a good thing, tochter,” Lilli continued. Ruth could feel her grandmother's eyes on her face.

  “A good thing,” echoed Pip. “You have to work at it. Keep it in your hands. Because you think the way you feel tonight and tomorrow and next month will be the way you feel forever, but it isn't.”

  “Once you have children, you'll never love him again in the same way,” Lilli said solemnly. Ruth looked at her then. Pip was nodding vehemently, and the two of them looked at each other, as if she, Ruth, had left the room. What did they know that she didn't? Ruth didn't want to find out.

  But the comment stayed with her all these years, and though Pip and Lilli were both long gone, she had found them to be right, at least about this. Once your children came, you never did feel the same way about your husband. Oh, it's not that you loved him less; on the contrary, it was easy to feel even more infatuated with this potent god who had bestowed upon you these treasures, these living miracles. It was rather that your focus, once so narrow and intense, widened and grew diffuse. Instead of being just the two of you, in your own private bubble of happiness (or anger, or disappointment), the bubble expanded to include three, then four and then five. And after a while, it burst altogether. There was no thinking about yourselves as just a couple anymore. You would forever and always be a couple with children. So while before she had the boys Ruth might have been crushed by Oscar's infidelities, real or imagined, by this point in their lives, she did not think she could have shattered the vessel that had been their marriage just because he had fantasized about sleeping with some other woman. Or even because he had slept with her.

  Ruth also knew how these small infatuations helped take the sting out of his failed ambition and allowed him to forget that he was not on a level with Pinchas Zukerman or Yehudi Menuhin and not likely to be either. Though when Oscar and Ruth met, all those years ago, anything seemed possible for him. And she truly thought that back then, anything was.

  They had met in the Berkshires, during an eight-week music workshop at Tanglewood. Ruth knew who Oscar was before he was aware of her; he was something of a star that summer, and very handsome besides. He was tall, even taller than she was, which mattered to her then, and although there was something graceless and boxy about his body, his face was arresting: thick, dark hair without a hint of shine, heavy, dark brows and, under them, eyes of an uncommon greenish-blue. Their first son, Gabriel, had those eyes and that hair. But he hadn't inherited the fierceness Oscar had had when he was young, nor the resolute set of lips and the nostrils that flared—wide and alarmed as those of a startled horse—with the least provocation.

  Ruth had no reason to believe that Oscar would even notice her then. She was not having a good time, not at all. Though she knew she should have considered herself lucky—Lilli had insisted on paying Ruth's bill for the voice lessons and her mother had managed to get her a job that paid for room and board—she didn't like Tanglewood, or Massachusetts, or the fabled Berkshire mountains. “You're so lucky to get out of the heat,” chorused her mother, her two grandmothers, her sister, Molly, her aunts Ida and Yetta and Cookie and Pessie, as they sweltered in Brooklyn.

  But Ruth liked the summers in Brooklyn. Her room, the one she had slept in since she was nine, with its pink-and-white-striped wallpaper and white dotted-Swiss curtains, was a haven to her, even on the hottest nights. Her mother routinely ironed the sheets, so they were always sleek and cool to the touch. She left a pitcher of ice water on a nightstand by the bed, and although all the ice cubes would have melted by morning, the water would still be cold. A big rotating fan sat on the dresser and she became accustomed to the pleasant whirring of its massive old blades. No, Ruth had no desire to exchange all that for a room shared with three other girls, for mosquitoes the size of flies, flies the size of bees and bees the size of hummingbirds. But a summer in the country, said her mother. The country, echoed her grandmothers and aunts. She was unable to resist their collective pressure.

  Once at Tanglewood, Ruth tried to make the best of it. She was given a job in the kitchen, helping to prepare the breakfast, which she didn't mind at all. Mornings were filled with classes and coaching; afternoons with rehearsals—the students were giving a small concert at the end of the summer—and swimming at a nearby lake. It was at the lake that she had met Oscar. Late in the afternoon, Ruth had sat on the pebbled shore, watching him. Everyone else had already filtered back to their cabins to change and get ready for dinner. Oscar was a surprisingly graceful swimmer, his arms easily breaking the otherwise placid surface of the water. He seemed oblivious to her. After a while, he stopped and stood waist-deep, staring in her direction. When he started moving in toward the shore, Ruth impulsively decided to go for a swim and stood up. She wore an unadorned one-piece black bathing suit that she had purchased in town when a couple of her roommates had driven in and asked her along. The flowered suit with the flouncy skirt her mother had packed was stuffed at the bottom of the suitcase with the price tag still intact. Oscar was close enough to see her now. Ruth felt—and it was an odd feeling for her—totally comfortable with her body, and with his unwavering attention to it. He stood there, dripping water and breathing heavily in the late afternoon sun.

  “You need a towel,” Ruth said, and held hers out to him. He reached for it and grabbed her hand too.

  “Oscar Kornblatt,” he said, and he actually bowed.

  “I know,” Ruth said.

  “And you are . . .?”

  “Ruth Fass.”

  “Ruth,” he said softly, as if reciting a poem or a prayer. “Ruth Fass.” She never got to the water.

  And so the summer became much more interesting. Oscar was such a welcome change from the young men Ruth had been meeting, almost weekly, at her parents' insistence. The accountants, the clerks from her father's clothing store, the earnest would-be professionals at Temple Beth Elohim's Thursday-night singles' socials. And because Oscar was considered so talented, her being with him conferred upon her an immediate status that she had previously lacked. It was as if everyone could tell just how serious you were about your professional life as a musician. Oscar was known to be both passionate and gifted, whereas Ruth, despite her lovely voice, lacked the essential commitment that formed the core of every serious musician.

  She had never even wanted to sing opera; that was her mother's idea. When her mother heard Ruth singing for the pure love of it, she decided to harness that love to something she could understand, and be proud of. She found a voice teacher, a plump, rounded woman who lived in Brighton Beach but who had performed at the Opéra in Paris and spoke enough German—with the right pronunciation—to please Lilli, so she was deemed acceptable. Then, when it was felt Ruth had outgrown her, there were lessons in Manhattan, in a studio on West Fifty-seventh Street, just across from Carnegie Hall. And it wasn't as if Ruth didn't enjoy what she learned; when she opened her mouth to sing, the music just welled up pure and strong, pouring out as if she were merely the conduit. But, inside, Ruth had another dream, one that she never shared with her family, her teachers, the other girls at Tanglewood that summer or even with Oscar.

  In this dream, Ruth was singing, but something low and sultry; more Billie Holliday than Joan Sutherland. The musical accompaniment was minimal: a piano and perhaps a saxophone or clarinet. There was a clear pool of light around her and she stood in its center, wearing a simple black dress—maybe satin, maybe velvet—that was scooped out low in front and just kind of skimmed over the rest of her body. Her hair was pinned up and in it, she wore a few roses; she could smell them when she closed her eyes, which she did from time to time. When she opened her mouth to sing, all the sweet, sad and b
eautiful things she had ever known and felt, the audience was rapt with pleasure and with sorrow, but not for her; no, it was because she was singing all their secrets too, the ones they never dared to tell and were now so exhilarated to have finally revealed. This fantasy had no place at Tanglewood, or anywhere else in Ruth's life, for that matter. Once she started seeing Oscar, it was easy to let his dreams take over for both of them. She never minded; in fact, she was grateful. By the end of the summer, they were in love; by the winter, he had asked her to marry him.

  Ruth's family was ecstatic: Oscar had bowed to her mother; he had gone so far as to kiss the hands of both Lilli and Pip when they were introduced. “A prince!” declared Pip. Even Ruth's father, coarsened by a Depression-era childhood and years in the garment trade, succumbed to Oscar's charm. “That boy is going somewhere” was his comment. And it seemed as if Ruth was meant to go with him.

  Her parents insisted on a big wedding and neither Oscar nor Ruth tried to dissuade them. It would have been useless anyway. Oscar might as well really have been a prince and she his princess for all the effort and expense lavished on the single day. There was a four-course dinner, the famed Viennese table and a wedding cake the size of a small washing machine. Several of Oscar's cronies played classical selections throughout the meal and then still others played the waltz in which he spun her, not too adroitly but with much feeling, around the polished wooden dance floor. There were scads of white roses, an expensive dress and veil that came as a favor to Ruth's father from someone in the business, and wedding gifts of more china, crystal, linen and silver than they would ever need or want. It was only later, when the babies came and they were living in that basement on East Sixth Street, that the reality of their situation became clear to her.