Dance to the Piper

by AGNES DE MILLE

24

NOTHING succeeds like failure,” said Rebecca West to me. And sure enough, back home in New York a little later, I was given a chance to do a stage show called Hooray for What, directed by Vincent Minelli, the scenery and costume designer, his first directorial assignment. It was written by Lindsay and Crouse with a score by Harold Arlen and lyrics by E. Y. Harburg. Ed Wynn was the star. Kay Thompson and Hannah Williams (Mrs. Jack Dempsey) were the leading ladies. This is a notable group of names, and one would think they might ensure a high degree of professionalism. It turned out not. The project began decently enough with a telegram from Vincent Minelli. The salary was small but adequate. I came gladly.

The Business Manager, since deceased, I did not care for. It is the custom to speak kindly of the dead; but having entertained nothing except loathing for him when alive, I see no reason now to veil my opinion. He it was who set the dancers’salaries. “Thirty-five dollars a week and a little loving on the side.”Plain and frank like that. I insisted on having two girls I knew, Mary Meyer and Dorothy Bird. He thought they were hideous. Mary had done a part for Thalberg and Cukor and had modeled for Hoyningen-Huene and Harper’s Bazaar, while Dorothy was one of Graham’s chief soloists and looked like something off the Parthenon. But they were not the Business Manager’s type and he didn’t want them around. Fortunately, Arlen and Harburg and Crouse disagreed.

The Business Manager’s type, or the type of the men who put up the money, or their henchmen’s type, I was to learn well as time passed. They did not assemble all at once; they drifted in day by day as rehearsals progressed — faded, jaded, raddled with drink, hawk-eyed, hard-mouthed, and insolent. And for every one of these, I had to let a trained dancer go. I had to take them, and I couldn’t fire them, not if they fell down dead-drunk at my feet, not if they were three hours late. They wore fine furs over their bathing suits, and diamonds, and platinum slave bracelets, and they talked about how they wished they were Barbara Hutton. Great limousines with liveried chauffeurs fetched them at the stage door. They didn’t know their left knee from their hair dye. One astonishing girl, fresh back from Australia or South Africa, allowed as how she always got a job whenever she blew into town. It didn’t matter how far along rehearsals were. They didn’t dare not hire her. She didn’t specify why. She thought I was nuts, but she liked me. They all thought I was nuts, but Girlie was the only one who liked me. I committed the indiscretion of making the ladies bend their backs the first day. The next rehearsal none of them could walk and complained to the management. I was asked to be reasonable. I also haughtily refused to give the favorites special things to do, although I knew very well what powers stood behind them. I might have played ball just a little, but I scorned to, and I worked my own ruin and knew it but would not change.

Right off I got into trouble. The management wanted the girls exposed as much as possible, face front always, bosom bared, legs just visible to the waist. Minelli had all sorts of trick costumes planned, gas masks on their faces, barbed wire wrapped around them (made of rubber, forty-five dollars a yard). He was stressing irony. Business Manager was more interested in sex. Neither gave way. I took my instructions from Minelli since he had hired me.

Rehearsals were a horror, and there was never ten minutes of privacy or quiet. When I sat on stage I knew that the bosses had sneaked in and were prowling the aisles whispering. I developed a tic from snapping my head to see who was spying behind me. When I sat out front, I knew by the sudden inattention and heightened chattering and giggling that you-know-who had entered through the stage door, and was sitting just out of sight teasing and snooping. I pleaded for privacy. I denounced. I warned. No use. The evening rehearsal was the after-dinner fun of all the bosses and their lawyers and their lawyers’ guests, and all visiting bigwigs from Hollywood, and all backers, and backers’ wives; and all my little adventuresses primped and giggled and studied the guests with experienced eyes and paid me not the slightest mind. Naturally, I was on the way out already. Only I didn’t know it. The management had never wanted me. They didn’t like what they saw. It was Minelli who had forced me on them along with his damned gas masks and rubber wire. They got along busily with their plans at the back of the orchestra while I sat on stage and tried to compose something good and tried to see who was walking back there and why. And very soon the great dance director of musicals, Robert Alton, made his appearance and I was told that he would divide the work with me. I had no agent. I accepted this without a word, but I chilled to the last nerve. Thereafter, I got the troupe only now and then.

We went to Boston. The dress rehearsal lasted without break three days and two nights. We went into the theater on a Tuesday and came out Thursday noon. Minelli had altered the sets for his own reasons without telling; and whereas I had been given to understand there would be four exits, at the corners, I now found there was one, directly center. Also the stage was not square but pieshaped. Dancers were given trains, hats, and swords they had not counted on. Several numbers became disasters.

And now the henchmen arrived in a body, together with the backers and agents, and walked up and down the aisles and selected what girls they wanted and gave advice indiscriminately to everyone about whom to fire and what to cut, a very handsome, upright group of men, as helpful in this time of stress as they were entertaining and refreshing.

The book wasn’t going too well and we were all treated to the spectacle of our chiefs screaming and reviling one another across the theater. Harburg, who had just gotten out of a hospital, denouncing Minelli; Minelli, his eyes bulging from his head with fixed fury, turning on Wynn; Wynn taking his time. B.M. harassing and chivying Crouse and Lindsay. Hannah Williams in tears. Jack Dempsey wanting to poke someone but not rightly knowing whom; Kay Thompson grim-lipped and sardonic. The chorus boys began to fall over like ninepins. The girls, of course, were indestructible, but they were not happy. As for me, I knew I was licked. I hoped only to save something of my work.

25

WE opened. Most of the show was lousy, some was good. That night after the performance my girls were called on the phone and ordered up to a party. Mary and Dorothy refused to go; Mary was fired later at the first pretext. Two of the singers they were rooming with did go, and came back very soon weeping. The hospitality upstairs was of the real old-fashioned kind.

The next morning I was fired. The following day Hannah Williams and the leading man. Two days later Kay Thompson. B.M. fired me in the middle of the Touraine lobby. He forbade me to re-enter the theater or speak to my dancers. I did go to talk to Paul Haakon, who had been a most sympathetic worker, but B.M. came hurrying after, called him aside, and Paul slunk away to the other side of the house. Minelli had taken to his bed and seemed unable to cope. The others were busy tearing one another’s throats open. I went alone to the railroad station. Someone had given me some red roses and I said good-by debonairly at the theater, handing them out to whoever was still brave enough to risk a nod and smile. A few broke from duress and stole away to the station, Haakon among them, and just as the train left, her face streaming with tears, came my Mary. “They’re tearing your work to pieces. Every lovely thing you did. I couldn’t save one thing. It’s all wasted and destroyed. They wouldn’t wait until you got out of town.” I said something terse and four-lettered, kissed them all and climbed aboard. I was free of it. My New York phone rang at 2.30 the next morning. It was Kay Thompson and she said, “I have good news for you. B.M. has just fallen off the stage and broken his back.”

“This isn’t true,”I said. “You’re just saying this to make me feel good.”

But it was true. His back was broken all right. He had been scrabbling up over the footlights to tear the pretty dress I had allotted Dorothy Bird from her back and give it to one of his harpies, his face distorted with hate, his fingers clutching for the hooks, when his foot slipped. Not one person on the stage moved to help him for appreciable seconds. But even from the hospital, he wove his spell. Thompson was fired—just tapped on the shoulder and told as she went from the stage, “That will be your last performance, Miss T.”

Equity has made most of these abuses impossible. I am sure a great deal of the reform stemmed directly from this unseemly and disreputable production. This was typical for its time. This is what the musical theater was like, full of glamour and things.

The only pleasant episode connected with this experience was a conversation I had with Robert Alton, my successor. One day, toward the end, he sat me down in the theater and told me what mistakes I had made. He was neither pompous nor boasting; he spoke out ot friendly good will and a vast experience. I have profited by his remarks ever since and I remember him with gratitude for a gesture of what I consider true generosity. His rules for rehearsal are as follows; I repeat them for the benefit of all young choreographers: —

1. Begin with something technical and definite.

2. Begin on time. Be prompt.

3. Do not let the chorus sit down.

4. Never let them make a mistake. Do not pass over a fault. Stop them in the middle of a bar if necessary and correct.

5. Polish as you go along.

6. Never seem in doubt.

7. Never let the bosses see anything unfinished. If you have only eight bars to show them, show them this much and no more. If you have not this much, get up yourself and demonstrate.

There is one alternative to this set of restrictions: to wit, work in private. The first four rules I still observe carefully, except sometimes number four. Alton was referring to chorus dancers. He did not often work with artists. The mistake of an artist may be a godsend. The last rule, number seven, applies to the old-style producer. It has no reference to people like Rodgers and Hammerstein, Langner and Helburn, who have understanding of the creative process and who have, moreover, a sense of courtesy; who have — let us put it this way — common sense.

As for never seeming in doubt, that’s ridiculous. Every choreographer disembowels himself, and every experienced dancer knows it and expects it. But Alton worked the other way — at a speed suggestive of a radio sports commentator, with a whistle between his teeth. The dancers adored him. No time was wasted in his rehearsals. Slick, finished, and speedy, the work went together. There were no great moments of dramatic revelation, but each routine was solidly built and effective.

This was my last brush with Broadway until Oklahoma! Oklahoma!, I believe, was the first musical show where every dancer was hired for just one reason — that he or she was the best available performer for the role. I stand on the record that this system, although prissy, worked.

One last word about Hooray and I have done. I am pleased to be able to close on an exhilarating note. Later my incredible mother assembled these same chorus girls for a class in Single lax. They came not once but often.

26

AT NIGHT in the little personal hours I did the dreadful arithmetic. Youth gone. No husband. No child. No achievement in work. I used to wake cold and consider the situation. Time was passing. My prospects had over a decade ago ceased to be bright. When I was asleep and defenseless, nightmare took over. There was no answer to reflections of this nature but the lonely breakfast and again barre beginning with pliés, as barre had begun for the last twenty years.

In the meantime the world rocked and convulsed with war. If my dynamics had slowed to an imperceptible pulse, the temper of nations quickened. My partner was drafted and in the army, and for the third time I lost a dancer it had taken years to train. I packed up the costumes carefully. I have never unpacked them. Concert work was finished for the duration. I could earn nothing teaching. Broadway was closed, Hollywood impervious, the Metropolitan as always sealed off, the ballet world cool.

I could not go on bleeding Mother white. She was aging and had suffered a frightening heart attack which laid her up for months. She had driven herself to the breaking point and, as always, resisted doctors’ help. It was in rushing to snatch the phone from my sister’s hands and to declare she was perfectly fine that she fell senseless between us. And as we labored to carry her to her bed, she moaned and muttered, “Don’t slop your work. Don’t think of me. Go back to your dancing. I have Margaret’s dress to finish.”Small luxuries counted now. She must have help although she seemed bright enough and, despite all medical warning, was pacing herself as before.

I had been given a fair, long chance to prove my mettle, and I seemed only to drain off her resources dollar by dollar. Plainly I hadn’t made good. But I had done my utmost. I must rest on this and accept God’s will. There was, however, one further thing I could do. I could quit.

I intended to go down to Macy’s, where my sister Mag, now divorced, had been learning merchandising, and get a job at a ribbon counter or wherever they’d take me, and earn a stipulated weekly salary, no matter how small. I would not continue to wear my sister’s cast-off clothes as I had done for the past eight years. I would budget myself and live on my own earnings. At the end of a year I would be able to hand in an income tax — something I had done only once in my life.

On the subway one day, I met Irving Deakin’s wife. The Russian Ballet was to have a new work, she said, and Irving was trying to persuade them that it would be a novelty to have an American ballet by an American and not by Massine. Irving was pulling for me, and had I a scenario? I said yes promptly. I hadn’t. I went home and locked myself in for three days. I’d better use dance steps I was sure of. It would be horrible to get stuck with all those fancy Russians standing around, so I decided to enlarge on the Rodeo studies which had been performed in London earlier and use sections of choreography already worked out. Draining great pots of tea, I wrote it all out, and then it seemed simply awful. But in a spirit of total despair I submitted it anyway and was summoned to my first interview with the boss of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Sergei Ivanoviteh Denham.

27

CERTAINLY I had never dealt with anyone like him. He had been a banker, he told me, but he looked like an Old World diplomat, slender, suave, and silky. He tiptoed through large circumventions and maneuverings with pussy-cat elegance and, while never losing track of the grave involvements, bent to all the little attentions with the zest of a courtier. There was a sense of timelessness about him, ease and leisure. He almost gave the impression that nothing at all mattered except beauty and the grace of human relationship. His long aristocratic hands lay serene on the desk or fluttered in delicate accentuation, his dark eyes gazed deep, his dead-white unwrinkled brow bent in gentle courtesy toward you just as though, behind that bland forehead, were not wheels within wheels within wheels. The soft voice rose and fell in singsong monotony with the caressing rubato of enthusiasm as he talked of grandiose monetary involvements, or Michelangelo, or the advisability of accepting an insupportable salary. His business exploits were a kind of saraband, and he wore protocol and prerogative like gold lace. The chair he sat in while the company warmed up backstage had his name painted on it and was always placed center-stage square in the middle of rehearsal. He had the right to stand in the wings with his guests no matter how crowded or hectic, or to walk with his guests into any rehearsal. He was always, even on these occasions, a charming conversationalist. He said to me, “Alexandra Danilova is the Russian Ballet. She is The Star, The Ballerina, the only one left in the Grand Tradition, but she rises whenever I enter a room because I am The Impresario. I am a democrat, but that is nice, no?" He considered for a minute the beauty of her deference. “That is tradition,” he breathed, like an Amen.

Although the situation I found myself in was ornate and rich with treacherous personalities, I had these advantages: —

1. I said just what I meant, which baffled the Russians to a standstill and set them to figuring at length what lay behind my seeming naïveté. Nothing lay behind it. But they didn’t realize this for several years. I was to them a figure of mystery.

2. They spoke Russian, so I could not understand their objections.

3. I thought they were a down-at-heel, shabby company who had got by with hokum for far too long, so I was not hampered by awe or any such restricting emotion.

4. I believed that I could do something good.

5. This was to be my last job, so it didn’t matter anyway.

“Whom do you want for a composer?” said Denham in his high voice.

“The best, Aaron Copland.”

“I have heard this Copland is good.”

“You have heard correctly.”

“Now, supposing we cannot arrange this with him? Who is your second choice?”

I had fifteen dollars in the bank, and I was now shopping for the world’s great composers. I adjusted my sister’s hat with a languorous gesture and drawled, “Let us decide that when Copland definitely refuses.” And I put my heels hard on the floor to keep my knees from trembling.

“Now, Miss de Mille,” Mr. Denham cooed and sighed, “let us do this thing with lyricism and with beauty.”

At the mention of this dangerous word I set my teeth. It was going to be a tough fight on money, I could see. “Talk to my lawyer about the aesthetics,” I muttered.

“Naturally, naturally.” His hand described an eighteenth-century parabola. “But let us not have just American brawn and vim. Let us not have only the American hotcha. There is also lyricism. There is also poetry.”(He’s going to try to get away with four hundred dollars for the whole job, I thought.) “There is the tender side of life.”

“Mr. Denham,”I interjected, “have you ever seen a running set?”

“Frankly, no, I have not.”

“Or any native American dance not devised by Leonide Massine?”

“To tell truth, no.”

“Then,” I said, “relax. You have in mind the Cossack version of our native forms, which differs from the Colorado.”

“Ah-ha!” said a voice in the corner. A largedomed, bald, egg-shaped gentleman by name David Libidins had seated himself behind me. “A younge lady who knows her mind. This I like. This I like verrry much.” And he went into a mouthful of Russian which sounded like hot chocolate and whipped cream mixed with teeth. Libidins was business manager and comptroller. He was enormous. He was male. Part llama, part bull. He was also very smart. Every so often he giggled with a high piercing Russian male giggle that boded no good for someone. At the moment he told me he was writing his memoirs and submitting them not to an editor, as one might suppose, but to his lawyers, and he was right to do this. It is virtually impossible, he told me, to write three consecutive sentences about the Ballet Russe without infuriating colleagues. Evidently his lawyers were firm. I wish, indeed I wish, they had not been.

“Now, Miss de Mille,” he said, “continue. Speak out all what you wish.” Later he called me Malinki, which means “small.” I don’t know why he took my part. But he did, right from the beginning. He said I had a back like Fedor Chaliapin. He also said that Chaliapin’s torso when stripped was the finest in the world. But it is my impression he was comparing us dynamically.

Sergei Ivanovitch Denham continued, “Let us have a large red barn for the party scene.”

“But, Mr. Denham,” I said, “there are no barns in the Southwest. I have a relative who owns eight thousand head of cattle, an average amount. They do not go into a barn at night.”

“But a barn is so interesting, so picturesque. Benois once designed me an enchanting red barn. You cannot imagine what an effect was the deep red behind the dancing.”

“Square dancing?”

“No, moujiksy but the reds were incredible.”

“No barn, Mr. Denham.” I glanced at David Savielovitch Libidins.

“Da!” he said and his ponderous head chopped forward as though decapitating Denham’s idea. “It is her cattle. This she knows about.” He muttered in Russian. “There will be no barn,” he said airily to me.

“But, above all,” Denham continued in his high hypnotic tone, “let us seek to keep all beautiful and lyric.”

I hastened out to hire the toughest lawyer I could find.

On the bus home I met, of all people, Martha Graham! “This is a mighty strange adventure I’ve embarked on!”

“At last,” she cried, “one of us has breached the impregnable. Now, Agnes, you listen to me. Be arrogant. You’re every bit the artist any one of them is. This they won’t know because they don’t know art from a split kick, but they will recognize arrogance, and for your sake, for our sakes, show them what it is like, once in a way, to be on the receiving end.”

I took the pledge. She kissed me. “Remember,” she called. I pranced down the street waving the roses in my, or rather Margaret’s, hat.

But although he may not have understood all he was bargaining for, it was Denham and Denham only, a Russian and an alien, who gave me my real chance, supported and furthered my efforts and lent the resources of the Ballet Russe at the height of their power. Deakin and Libidins could have urged until kingdom come; Denham listened and Denham agreed.

28

WE SETTLED on Aaron Copland for music, and Oliver Smith and Kermit Love to design scenery and costumes. Toward Denham I continued to evince a Bismarckian assurance. I might wake in the night shuddering with fear — but I dared not show him a crack in my conceit. A more opinionated and disagreeable girl he had never dealt with. I may have overdone it, but the role was new to me. In any case, the discipline worked. Once the word secretly came to me that Copland had signed, I put the heat on. The lawyer and he grappled and struck for terms far higher than Mr. Denham hoped. Upshot: five hundred dollars for the work. (It took five months, a guarantee of twenty-five dollars a week, just about the ribbon saleswoman’s salary I’d hankered after.) Twelve-fifty royalty for the first ten performances of every season, ten dollars for the next ten, seven-fifty thereafter. I was to dance the opening night. He balked at this, but I stood firm, and he yielded at last with the understanding that I would accept the minimum union wage — fifteen dollars. That was my salary per performance for the opening season in New York.

I began to show some of the dance steps to Frederic Franklin and Lubov Roudenko—I insisted on privacy — and the three of us behind locked doors tried out the hoe-down. The régisseur, Ivan Ivanovitch Yazvinsky, uneasy outside, put his eye to the keyhole and froze with dismay. He rushed to the telephone and warned his master. I was, he said, reducing the Ballet Russe to the status of a night club. All this was going on in the hall right behind me, but in Russian, so I never knew. Denham lost no time in getting to my lawyer. There must be a clause, he said, guaranteeing him the right of veto; otherwise, how could he count on my taste? I might put a mustache on a Rembrandt.

“Never,” said I. He was buying my taste and no one else’s. He could call the whole deal off if he wished.

With this statement I came of age. This was, I believe, professionally speaking, the first brave and independent thing I ever did. But this was my last job and I intended to have fun and do exactly what I pleased.

The contract was signed. No veto clause. I had final word on every artistic matter. This was important, for into their stronghold of tradition enforced by an almost Prussian discipline I entered to break down all their cherished habits, to awake instincts curbed and warped by inflexible techniques, to disturb the balance of power, to question their authorities, authorities which had brought them international success, champagne suppers, and glamour—not money, of course, they never expected that, but unstinted adulation.

No doubt they muttered a good deal. Russians do. Luckily, as I have remarked, it was in Russian and no trouble to me.

But they stood whenever I entered the room and allowed me to precede them through the doors. Even Danilova, the great ballerina, adored on three continents and with an immortal reputation, even she stood and followed after. I was the choreographer, in my sister’s borrowed dress and hat and my sister’s shoes, and with a necklace lent by my sister. I knew very well what I was facing. Behind me, too, was a lifetime of discipline, no success, but discipline, nonetheless. In my homemade embattled way, I felt ready. We joined forces.

29

THE Russians entrained for the Far West. I went on the same train, but not with them. I had to live on my twenty-five dollars a week and pay my New York rent. I got besides three dollars a day traveling expenses to cover everything — hotels, food, taxis, and so on. Mr. Libidins put into my hands a round-trip transcontinental railroad ticket, first class, which I promptly turned in and rode coach. The difference in fare balanced my budget. I carried my clothes in a light wicker basket to obviate porters’ tips. I ate only sandwiches, and drank coffee in cartons. Four and a half days is a long time not to be out of one’s clothes, but at the other end was a clean bed waiting at Father’s. When we came into stations, I hid behind the luggage until the troupe had cleared the platforms. It would not do for them to see their choreographer coming out of a coach; Massine had traveled in a drawing room.

This was July, 1942. At every station, groups of drawn and pallid young men came aboard leaving women with obliterated faces and whimpering children on the station platforms. We finally reached the Coast.

The first rehearsal was held in what had been Carmalita Maracci’s studio, now in the hands of Maria Bekefi. I asked for the men first. If I could break them, I would have the whole company in my hand. As I walked down the flowering drive I heard the music of Gaité Parisienne and a good deal of stamping and shouting. Shoura (Alexandra) Danilova and Freddie Franklin were standing on chairs yelling the counts and clapping. The men, the great thick-muscled men, and the stringymuscled girls were stamping and swooping and clenching their fists in a miasma of sweat. It was not a very large room and Shoura and Freddie were up to their waists in Parisian abandon. I glanced in and I went pale. Gaité finished, the girls hung about, streaming sweat, their shoes and towels under their arms, very curious. Danilova was collecting her slippers.

“You would like this room empty? No?”

“Please.” I nodded faintly.

She clapped her jeweled hands and stilled the hubbub. “Madame would like this room empty. Emediately! Get out,” she said with dainty succinctness. “Get out. You! All go.” Then she turned to me and grasped my hand. “Now I go too because that is more convenient for you. I have great excitement for this. We hope much. Bonne chance!” And with a twinkling smile, she walked neatly out on her long, silken, fabidous legs and her turned-out feet, leaving a breath of delicious and expensive perfume behind her.

I turned deliberately and faced them. There they were — nineteen of them. Male. Great muscled brutes leaning against the barre and staring with watchful, smoldering eyes. Behind them were Paris, Covent Garden, Monte Carlo, and, in three cases, the Maryinski. And behind me? A wall. It occurred to me at this precise moment that, with the exception of five soloists, I had never worked with men in my life. Never more than one man at a time.

I took a deep breath. “We are going to begin,” I said in a scarcely audible treble, “with men riding horses in a rodeo. For instance, if you were riding a bucking horse and were thrown, it would look like this.” And I rode a bucking horse and was thrown the length of the room on my head.

“Darling!” said Freddie rushing over to me. “Darling, you’ll hurt yourself!”

“Did it look good, Freddie?”

“It looked wonderful! But you’ll kill yourself.”

“Not me. It’s you who are to do it.”

The young men, around the room, looked nonplused.

“Well,” said Freddie, “no help for it. Come on, boys, let’s have a try. Ee —”

The riding movements were neither realistic nor imitative. I had worked for a year in London to make them intrinsically beautiful. When performed correctly they suggested the high vigorous emotions of riding. But they were very difficult because the dancer had always to look as though he were propelled by an unseen animal. He hung off balance in the air. He did not jump, he was thrown or wrenched upwards. His feet never touched earth, it was the horses’ feet that clattered in the pebbles. The very essence of the movement was shock, spasm, and effort.

Alas, although big boys, they had been trained to move like wind-blown petals. “ Raise your arms, I begged them. “You have men’s arms, they have striking power, they can control a heavy, moving rope, or the brute furies of an eight-hundred-pound animal.”

Up came the delicate wrists and the curled fingers of the eighteenth-century dandy. “Move from the solar plexus and back,”I shouted, not from the armpit. Think of athletes,”I entreated. “Think of throwing a ball, from your feet, from your back, from your guts.”But it was a long time since they had thrown balls. They had forgotten. They had not used the ground since they were children except to push away from it. Their arms rose up and down but they themselves looked absolutely stationary.

“Don’t plier. Sit your horse,” I implored. “There’s a difference.” But the strain was too much and they relaxed back into bad second position, where they felt eminently at home.

A few Russians lolled on the barre and considered the matter poorly. “It is not dancing,”they said. But I had never said it was, and I was delighted to excuse them. They picked up their towels and left in haughty silence. The ranks thinned quickly. I had planned to have eighteen men in the cast. I settled for ten. Those that stayed were ready and able.

For two hours, I rolled on the floor with them, lurched, contorted, jackknifed, hung suspended, and ground my teeth. They groaned and strained. I beat them out in impact, resilience, and endurance. I broke them to my handling. I broke them technically, which was where they lived and worshiped.

At the end, I suggested we walk. We what? We walk like cowboys. They looked at me in dumfoundment, their clothes matted to their bodies, their hair all on end and dirty from the floor. They walked. “Not that way,” I shouted.

By this time I was feeling pretty frisky. “Crotchsprung, saddle-sore, with rolled-over high heels and sweat-stained leather, ill at ease and alien to the ground, unhorsed centaurs.”

“Look,” I said. “The sun in Colorado beats on your eyes like blows. You can’t hold up your heads that way in the sun.”

“Why, that’s right,”said a couple nodding in recognition. They began to squint, their gait slowed, they grew hot and dusty and weathered before me. One could almost, as my sister said later, smell them. Out of this comes folk dancing, and out of nothing less.

I dismissed rehearsal. The survivors, mostly English and American, thanked me. Next day they couldn’t even walk. They sat in the sun and rubbed one another’s muscles with oil. And they all had cracking headaches. I had won.

Two days later I took on the girls. We walked, giggled, whispered, and looked to the far horizon for two hours. They thought this unreasonable. “Oh, Madame, we will be funny when we have costumes.”

“You be funny right now on count eight.” And 1 set my lips in a merciless line and waited.

We worked for four hours on a boy kissing a girl at a dance. This was the kind of effort they had put into high jumps or turns. They thought I was perverse. They thought I was insupportable. Well, not all of them, perhaps. Lubov Roudenko was breaking her back for me. She had perpetual headaches from the lurching and bucking. Freddie believed. A few of the American boys and girls, although perplexed, began to hope. Even in rehearsal some of it looked good, even to them. And there was always Freddie barking the counts and snapping at their feet. And dancing, dancing until the sweat poured from his back and head. “Oh, darling,”he would say gasping, “this is impossible. Well, there’s no help for it. Come on boys, let’s try. Ee—”

He was the first great male technician I had ever had the chance to work with and I tried everything I thought the human body could accomplish. He was as strong as a mustang, as sudden, as direct, and as inexhaustible. There was no slacking off at the end of a long effort, no dawdling, no marking. He came into the room briskly, dressed and ready at the first minute of the rehearsal, and he worked full out without a second’s deviation of attention until rehearsal finished, and the last lift was as precise and as vigorous as the first. With the exception of Massine, he has the most exact sense of timing of any man in the dance world. (He can pick up a difficult tap routine at a single rehearsal as quickly in fact as he hears it. Only very great tap dancers can do this.) His verve galvanizes an audience as it does a rehearsal. He is the inner motor of the Ballet Russe, the reason they get through the sheer amount of labor involved in each tour.

Luba Roudenko came to me. She was very happy with the role but her friends had told her she had a great technique and might she please, Miss de Mille, might she please do some fouettés in the hoe-down? I said no.

In San Francisco we got into the second scene. In Seattle, the third. All along the way I dropped Russians from the cast.

“Dear Agnes,”said Sergei Ivanovitch one night in the wings. “I hear you threw Sasha out of rehearsal today. That is unfortunate. To tell truth, I am pained. He is a fine young man, a bit impetuous, wild like all young men, but we must be indulgent. Appeal to his class, dear Agnes, appeal to his class.”I gasped in astonishment.

“He is a Count, Agnes, a Count.”

At this point I threw back my head rudely and simply hollered. Sasha had been surly, insolent, lazy, slow, untalented, demoralizing, tardy, and extremely hung-over.

“Agnes,” continued Denham persuasively, “I am the last person not to be democratic. I understand very well your ideals. But he is good material.”

I said no.

“And now,” continued Denham not unreasonably, “may I not see some little part of the ballet ?”

I said no.

“Agnes, dear Agnes, you treat me as though I were an outsider, an amateur in this business.”

I said no.

Nor would I allow the dancers to watch one another. Whenever more than four got in the same room pandemonium developed. Obviously, no choreographer before had explained clearly. After each suggestion there was a United Nations Assembly at the back of the room. I stamped, screamed, and howled for silence. I promised to ask their help when I was stuck. There was a good deal of surprise at this; no choreographer had ever acknowledged the need for help. Again, I criticized my own work sharply. Dumfoundment! All choreographers had hitherto been infallible.

Occasionally I was the one surprised. “Bob! Bob!” I yelled, urging them to dip and curtsy on the beat. The hubbub grew to a roar. “For the love of God, be quiet!” I howled. “And bob!”

“But Madame,” said a Russian as spokesman, “we cannot understand who you mean. Which Baub, please?” Four Roberts stepped forward with inquiring faces.

Throughout this tour, Danilova, like a princess godmother, threw her arm about me, introducing me to the best restaurants and the most charming hostesses. She had made this trip seven times annually; and inasmuch as she and Massine were the biggest box-office names in ballet, she was in a position to introduce me where and as I had never been introduced before. “Our choreographer,” she would say, pushing me ahead of her into a salon.

We traveled from city to city while the ballet performed its summer tour. Sometimes we stayed a week and sometimes one night. We spent a great deal of time together on the trains.

30

EVERY evening on tour I do a barre with the boys and girls hanging on to the costume trunks. I change my practice clothes in the star dressing room shared by the two great ladies of the troupe. They sit at opposite tables, fitted out with their dainties, and they quarrel delicately and precisely over precedence, choice of roles, and the other paraphernalia of their trade. Mia’s mama rummages in her trunk. Twysden, the lady helper, knits and practices scorn with unmodified English assurance.

Behind every great star there is usually a sad quiet woman mending or knitting. Some of them are quite horribly young women. Being a ballet mother is a métier in itself and different from any other function in the theater, and they develop occupational symptoms like extreme aggressiveness, extreme nervousness, extreme jealousy, and, as regards their own persons, extreme selflessness. They spend their youth sitting in smelly practice studios; they spend their middle age standing in the wings. They are drudges and do all manner of menial and selfless service forever underfoot, in daily oblivion. A few of the ballet boys have mothers too. These are rarer, but I believe more formidable.

The hour before performance is a visiting time in a ballet theater Outsiders are not welcome, but the girls and boys go back and forth between dressing rooms, gossiping, chatting, relaxing, letting go the outside, integrating more and more closely within their group. They seem to be wasting time. Actually they are undergoing a change. They are warming up, quieting down, cutting off from daily life. None of them will stay away from the theater and miss this hour; it is very important to them.

I visit the corps to go over tomorrow’s notes with some of my girls. The corps girls dress in barrack rooms at long trestles. Their tutus hang overhead like large inverted flower corollas. They make up nearly always stripped to the waist, the complicated tapes which pull up their tights dangling loose from their thighs. They are a very pretty sight as they lean forward to apply their enormous false eyelashes or put the markings around their eyes as elaborate and formal as a Japanese actor’s mask. Their hair is greased flat and nailed to the head with bobby pins so that they could be shaken like a rat in a terrier’s mouth and not a strand would be loosened. With the foliage of tarlatan fluff overhead, the candles for mascara twinkling in front of the glasses, and the naked pearly young bodies stretching and moving, the scene suggests a kind of grotto. They have the most beautiful bodies in the world and they are all pre-adolescent. There is not a hip or a bust among them. But that’s all right. It’s better for dancing and they all, whenever it suits them, have babies with the greatest aplomb, showing that everyone, but chiefly Mother Nature, is wrong. Between the nymphs move Madame Pourmel and wardrobe women with freshly ironed costumes. They say nothing. Their tired, raw fingers zip and hook and fasten. Their faces are bleached and faded. They are reminders of what lies ahead.

I hang around mostly backstage during performances. I rarely go front for the pertinent reason that from this aspect the spectacle is depressing, and I think it helpful at this moment not to become depressed. If I have spoken of all this with excitement it is because I know toward what the dancers are striving and what lies behind them. And because I have grown enormously attached to them. The plain fact is that from where the audience sits the performances are often poor; they are under-rehearsed, paltry and tired, and rely for their success on the glittering efforts of a few great soloists and the splendid heritage of their name. Is this company just another dingy troupe of acrobats? Does their fascination rest chiefly on nothing but good press-agenting? What distinguishes them from any traveling stock company?

Stand backstage at curtain rise and you will see. Their three-hour preparations are completed. They are ready now in full costume and make-up. They try steps nervously, complaining of the floor, complaining of the new batch of shoes, invocating the Madonna while cracking their tights, scolding the conductor while rosining their slippers, having indigestion from a too cheap dinner behind the electrician’s box, having love and heartbreak with finger pirouettes, receiving Denham’s benediction center-stage like a lump of sugar. The boxed-in space hums with pandemonium in three Slavic languages, peppered with French. The lights raise the heat to baking point. There is a sudden quiet from the pit and then a roll of drums. The company stops talking and stands. The girls smooth out their tarlatans. The boys run softly in place easing their insteps. The stage manager made up for Scheherazade continues to whisper to the electrician. The national anthem is being played — not their national anthem, a good proportion of them are homeless. They stand this way for “The Marseillaise,” “God Save the King,” “Maple Leaf Forever,” “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Nearly every one of them was born in a land whose anthems they will not hear in a hurry. The orchestra starts the overture. They move into place. They spit over one another’s shoulders. They do this every night throughout the tour. They say “Merde” or “Ni poukha ni péra” or whatever. They cross themselves three times right shoulder first and touch the wood of the floor. Denham takes up his folding chair and moves to the wings. The lights turn blue. Everyone’s mouth goes suddenly purple; their eyes glitter unnaturally. The grease in their hair takes on bright blue reflections. “I beginning,” yells Yazvinsky. “Kourrtain!” The curtain moves up. There is a rush of air from the front.

And they are Sylphides, and the music is Chopin. This is their native land. Every head is bent to the line. Every breath is bated. From toe tip to trembling fingers they are at attention. They move down the stage, these scrapping youngsters, in the oldest living tradition of our theater.

They share all the characteristics and faults of other theater folks with this difference: behind each turn of the head and footfall stand a lifetime of effort and three hundred years of experimentation. There is a glory carried by these poor, dingy, travel-worn waifs. The cost of this effort is isolation and abnormality. It constitutes blood sacrifice; they are dedicated people. They are bound together in common need like blitz victims. They are bound together by training and heritage. They are bound together, poor, deluded fools, by pride. Notwithstanding they are treated like bastard members of a family and are given the disadvantage of every doubt in all practical matters — in dressing-room arrangements, newspaper releases, legal documents, leases, charge accounts, sales agreements, savings and lending, and insurance policies — they are most unnaturally proud. They think they are doing the most difficult and interesting work in the theater.

31

JULY moved into August, August into September. We knitted and rehearsed and gossiped back across the continent in cars that were shunted aside to let trainloads of tanks take the right of way, and trainloads of men, some in uniform, but all with intent lost fanes. In New York we settled to three weeks of straight rehearsing, six hours a day. At night I prepared the final plans.

All of America was quickening, was affirming itself, was searching its heart. There was high challenge in every face one met. I used to stand in my studio on the hot summer nights and it seemed to me I could feel the quickening energy around me, the gathering of the force of remembering.

In some ways this was the happiest period of my adult life. I worked tranquilly between lives. I hoped not greatly; I feared nothing. It was very like the delicious expectant moment when one knows one is about to fall in love but has not yet hazarded the furies and commitments of the enterprise. I was in love with the haunting legends of my land. I was in love also with a soldier. And somehow the one became mysteriously a symbol for the other. I opened the great French windows of my studio to the New York night and walked and walked in the warm dusk lit only by the windows across the way, and played the lovely Texas songs Copland had set and thought of the prairies I had crossed as a child. I thought of the men leaving, leaving everywhere - generation on generation of men leaving and falling and the women remembering. And what was left of any of them but a folk tune and a way of joining hands in a ring? And I searched my heart for the clues to remembering.

In the morning I screamed for three hours at the Russians to shut up and be simple, and in the afternoon I screamed for three more hours to be quiet and be simple. We finished the ballet in ten days.

Then came the show rehearsal. Denham, Libidins, Franz Allers, Irving Deakin, Yazvinsky, with their wives, and my mother attended. No one had as yet seen any of it. The company assembled in immaculate black tights and white shirts. “Who told them to do this?" I asked delighted. Tradition. They stood quietly. They did not even whisper. They danced without a fault.

There was a cry from the spectators at the end. Libidins roared loudest. “Thanks God, Agnes, Malinki. Thanks God. What a ballet! Ham and eggs! Let me kiss you!”

“ What’s that?”

“Ham and eggs! Scheherazade, Gaité, Rodeo: ham and eggs. Our meal ticket for the next season!" Denham kissed me. Mrs. Denham kissed me. Allers kissed me. Mother kissed me. This was the first time she had seen any of the ballet. She was a trifle giddy,

“Now,” I said turning to the dancers, “we will really get to work.” But the room was empty. They had left on their vacation.

Since I was to dance the première, I used the time to brush up on my own dancing. I had practiced every night with them before performances and they were considerably alarmed. Before God, I was no technician. I shut myself in a studio and labored on the comedy.

The company reassembled three weeks later. Massine was about. Because of overlapping contracts he found himself at this time the husband of both the Ballet Theatre and the Ballet Russe, Ballet Theatre was housed also in the Metropolitan and their two-week season preceded ours. The two companies of dancers passed one another on stairs, in dressing rooms, rehearsal halls, lavatories, with the chill reserve and uncommunicative politeness of enemy officers about to join issue in a contest for survival. The following season they were most of them working for the opposite group and passed their former bedmates with the same hostile condescension. This behavior is a ballet tradition as old as the five positions, and dates from the time when the French despised the Italians and both decried the Russians and Danish. Even within Russia, there has always been ugly feeling between the Moscow and St. Petersburg schools; and considering that the dancers always ended up in the same theater, it made for a liveliness of atmosphere.

When our season began, the same audience returned in the same evening clothes. One noted the same cheering, the same lining-up on the lobby stairs to see who had come, the same promenading of dress and manner and presence, the same greetings, the same wandering, inattentive eyes, the same babbling of technical jargon by would-be initiates, the same drinking away of half the ballets in Sherry’s bar by the real initiates—to wit, Sol Hurok of the Ballet Theatre and his weary staff. During the American season one half the group murmured praise, the other half scorn— the parts were reversed the next week. It made no great matter. It all happened between dinner and supper. Differences may have been noted by the people who were there because they loved dancing. Their opinion has always been less conspicuously expressed. But the young men prowling at the back of the auditorium were undisturbed. From their point of view nothing had changed.

32

ON Monday before the opening we showed the ballet to Aaron Copland and I, not Lubov Roudenko, for the first time danced. Massine practiced a barre at the back of the room throughout. He had no business in that room, but bald curiosity compelled him to stay. Deakin came up to me at the shirt and whispered, “I see Bela Lugosi in fourth position back there.” I didn’t mind. I had so grown in confidence I didn’t mind. There were only five guests, but there was a small ovation at the end. Massine came to the front of the room without comment to take charge of the next rehearsal, his Rouge et Noire. He sat on a chair with his back to the mirror.

During the hoe-down I had kicked off one of my slippers, and it had shot under the chair on which he was sitting. To retrieve it I had to get down on my hands and knees and fumble long-armed behind his feet. He did not move. He looked down at me with his staring enormous expressionless eyes. “I see you have done a lively ballet!”

“Haven’t I?” I said, wiping the dirt off my hands and straightening up. “Yes, I think maybe I have.”

We had an orchestra reading. Aaron Copland sat in the front row. I sat beside him until about the twelfth bar; then I shot up and down the aisle. The cleaning women wiping the red velvet seats stood up now and then to listen. Some of the dancers came between the crack of the great gold curtain to hear what their cues sounded like on the instruments.

Then, the afternoon of the opening, we had dress rehearsal. That is, the scenery was up, Oliver’s lovely sets. Because of union prices, we only had one hour. There was no time to figure out entrances or exits or spaces. But those surprising ballet dancers figured everything for themselves. This was the moment experience paid off. They solved on the instant every spatial and directional problem. I kept my entire wits on myself and my own performance. Out in the red velvet auditorium in the endless scallops of empty seats sat Denham and Libidins and apart, very small and alone in a black tricorne, sat Mother.

I believe I didn’t eat.

I was in the theater at six. I shared a star dressing room with Nathalie Krassovska. I had my costumes because I had personally gone to Karinska’s and taken them away. I checked over every detail — bow, boots, belt, hat—again and again. I did a careful barre. I put on my make-up. And then who should come into my dressing room and sink into the armchair but Mrs. Massine. She conversed with Krassovska in Russian, but as I stripped and redressed, she cast long appraising looks at my body. And she was a great beauty with the elegance and arrogance of a woman who has known since girlhood that things would come easily to her.

Mrs. Massine did not stop talking for a minute. On and on and on she chattered. In Russian, thank God, but noisily. I had only a few minutes to make my peace with heaven. Rouge et Noire had been on for a quarter hour. I stepped to the door partly dressed. Danilova beckoned me across the hall. “Agnes, I can help you with your hair. I will show you how to fix so it not come loose. These little secrets I learn through many years.” She sat me at her dressing table and got to work with pins in her mouth. On the night of my debut Alexandra Danilova maided me-hairnets, barrettes, bobbies, elastics, and ribbons.

Rouge et Noire was over. I went back to my room. Mrs. Massine raised languid amused eyes to my taut face. “Are you nairvous?” she drawled.

“I am,” I said. “I am sick at my stomach.”

“Good luck! Success!” she said punctiliously.

I turned to her quietly. “I hope we have success. The success or failure of my life depends on the next half hour. And I hope, for the company’s sake, there is success. Much depends on this ballet for them, too. If I have failed them they are in a bad way. And they have worked hard, harder than you can imagine.”

Under the façade Mrs. Massine, like most people, has a heart. She was confounded. “As you say,” she murmured, “for all — success.”

33

I WALKED onto the stage. Everyone I knew was out front. Mother had seen to that. She herself was in a box in black lace. And in another box, not by accident, sat Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Theresa Helburn of the Theatre Guild. I had heard they were contemplating a play on Western cowboy life and I thought I could do good dances for them.

Mother alone was not nervous. “This is the first time I have not had to worry about the box office,” she said serenely. “And I didn’t have to spend the afternoon trying to impress my friends into coming.” The house was sold out.

Behind the gold curtain we stood in our cowboy pants, I among my men, nearly every one of whom has since become an important soloist. Beside Franklin stood Harold Lang, Casimir Kokic, James Starbuck, Robert Pagent, and David Thimar, and waiting in the wings for a walk-on was Maria Tallchief, and beside her Betty Low, Dorothy Etheridge, Milada Mladova, and Vladimir Kostenko, who was to play Jud in the Oklahoma! ballet for six years. We were in our pants because the Karinska cabs had begun to arrive filled with hysterical seamstresses and pins. There was a great rustling of tissue paper in the wings. On one side flowers were being unwrapped; on the other, dresses and hats no one had ever seen. There was also a great deal of whispering as to who was to put on what. Behind every piece of scenery the company in tights and dressing gowns crouched watching, head on head, with painted and elongated eyes like the larvae of insects. On folding chairs behind the tormentor sat Danilova and Slavenska, crossing themselves, spitting, and looking on me with shining eyes. Franz Allers, the conductor, kissed me. “Here we go, Malinki,” said Libidins. “Ham and eggs!”

Denham gave his blessing.

“I’m going in,” said Allers, and he left to enter the pit.

Freddie spat over my shoulder and bumped his knee against my rump. He didn’t say anything, He was tightening his belt and figuring out the spacing within the new set. He is eyes darted back and forth. I moistened my lips. This was a terrible moment, but I had company. I was no longer alone. There were men standing all around me — very great dancers. I looked at their thighs and their shoulders and the intensity of their faces, and I knew I would never again be alone.

The large descending octaves sounded from the brass, sharp as sunlight on rocks. We flexed our insteps and breathed deep. The gold folds contracted. The music was suddenly clear under our feet. The naked, living dark yawned.

“This is it, kids,” said Freddie, without moving his lips.

If it is possible for a life to change at one given moment, if it is possible for all movement, growth, and accumulated power to become apparent at one single point, then my hour struck at 9.40, October 16, 1942. Chewing gum, squinting under a Texas hat, I turned to face what I had been preparing for the whole of my life.

This was not a great performance; we gave better later. Neither was if a great ballet. The style, as I always feared, did break. But it was the first of its kind, and the moment was quick with birth.

There was applause on my first exit. An unexpected bonus. There was applause or response on every phrase. Did the audience laugh on count eight as I had promised in July in California? They laughed, not just female titters, but real laughing with the sound of men’s voices, and the laugh turned into handclapping. This happened again and again. The dancers were elated but not surprised. I had promised them laughs. The pantomime was spaced to accommodate them.

There were mishaps. At one point, Kokic grew confused with his new costumes and failed to make an entrance, leaving me to improvise a love scene, alone, and exposed for sixty-four bars of music on the Met stage. Lines were crooked. Some of the girls clapped off beat. It didn’t seem to matter.

The pace of the performance rushed us like a wind. The audience was roused and urging us on. Great exchanges of excitement and force and gaiety were taking place all around. The dancers rushed and whirled, grabbing the right person, because the right person was there, though unrecognizable in an unexpected dress and hair-do. And throughout the pace which was too quick for me, beyond my understanding, faster than could be savored or appreciated was Freddie’s hand, Freddie’s arm, Freddie’s strong back, propelling, pushing, carrying, and Freddie’s feet like bullets on the wood. It was beyond endurance. It was beyond help. It was slipping away too fast, too fast. Also my collar was too tight.

“Freddie,” I said at the back of the stage, “I’m fainting. Loosen my collar.”

“No time, duckie. Here we go.”

And as though we were blown out of the mouth of a gun, he propelled me to the footlights. We separated. Bob, bob. (Which Robert, Madame?) All the trumpets and horns threw their shafts between us. We hung on the brink. The music tore open. We rushed. We clashed. We were lifted. And all the girls had faces like stars with their hair dropping over the boys’ shoulders. The great curtain fell. There was dust in my nostrils from the dusty lining of the curtain. It was over. It was done. And I had made so many foolish mistakes. So many hasty things gone wrong. Once more I had been incapable of the perfect effort. “Oh, Freddie,” I said, “what a stinking, lousy performance. We must rehearse like demons tomorrow.”

I looked at him wistfully but we were walking forward and we were all holding hands and bowing. A large bunch of American corn was put in my arms tied with red, white, and blue ribbons. More flowers came, more flowers. The Russians did things this way. They also clapped and called out. Hadn’t I stood grinding my teeth at the back of the house for years while they cheered bogus nonsense? We bowed and bowed. At the eighth bow, I looked into the pit. The fiddlers were beating their bows on their instruments. The others were standing up yelling. No one gets the union boys to do this easily. I looked at Freddie in amazement. “Freddie,” I said, “this is not a claque. This is not Libidins’s contriving.”

“Darling, darling,” said Freddie, kissing me, “this is an ovation. This is the real thing. Take it.” He pushed me forward, and all the company backed away to the edge of the stage and stood there clapping.

We had twenty-two curtain calls.

The grips and members of the company helped me carry my flowers to the dressing room. They filled half the floor space. The doorman could not hold my friends in check.

In the hall between dressing rooms, I met Massine. He bowed formally, and then apparently thought he must say something. He stared at me with his binocular eyes. “ You have done a characteristic ballet.” I struggled to follow this. “And in Europe I think it will have success.” We bowed.

Mary Meyer sat at my dressing table crying and crying. “I can’t stop,” she said, mopping her nose. “It isn’t that this is the most wonderful ballet I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen better. It’s just that I can’t stand you making a success after all these years.”

“Aren’t you proud of her?” said the friends to Mother. And Annie drew herself up to their shoulders and, looking at them steadily with her penetrating blue eyes, answered, “I’ve always been proud of her. Always. When no one hired her. I’ll go home now and start the coffee.”

And in the lobby Billy Rose was marching up and down shouting, “But where has she been? Why haven’t we known about her? How could we have overlooked this talent ?”

And Terry Helburn was phoning in a wire to Western Union: WE THINK YOUR WORK IS ENCHANTING. COME TALK TO US MONDAY.

I did some phoning of my own. I called the Officer Candidate School at Aberdeen Proving Grounds and spoke to a soldier. “It is a success. It has made a furore.”

“Oh,” he said, “that does not surprise me. I knew it would.”

He knew it would! He’d known me six months and seen nothing of my work at all. He took this evening for granted. Well so, miraculously, did my mother. But she had waited fourteen years, had sewn costumes, sold bonds, nagged at her friends to attend her girl’s concerts, run errands, done without all luxuries, and hoped, and hoped, and hoped, steadily and without default in the face of reason and proof unlimited that her efforts would meet with no success. She was home now, serving coffee and chocolate cake and salad to all and sundry. This time the doors were wide open. Anyone could walk in.

(The End)