Mr. Volkov lowered himself onto the arm of the seat beside mine, both hands folded over his cane. “Your knee,” he said. “That night in 1968, I was twenty two, and I was the partner meant to catch you at the end of the lift. I was standing in the wings at the cue, ready. But the company manager, a man named Mr. Hargrove, stopped me with a hand on my chest. He said the program had changed. I did not understand until I heard the sound you made on the stage.” I held on to the pillar. I had never told anyone about that sound.
“Someone had waxed the spot where you landed,” he went on. “Heavily, with a mixture used for show floors, and only that one square yard. It was done on purpose. A dancer named Lorraine Vance wanted your role, and Hargrove wanted her in it. I saw the can the next morning behind the scenery. I told the board. They sent me to Pittsburgh. And you, Genevieve, they sent home with a letter from a doctor saying your joint had worn out from poor technique.” I whispered, “They told me I was careless. For fifty seven years I believed it.”
“I looked for you everywhere,” he said. “Laurent was your stage name, and your family had moved. I wrote to schools, to churches, to hospitals. Last spring, your granddaughter auditioned for me. She dances the way you did, with her neck, with her whole breath. When she said her grandmother taught second grade on the Plaza and paid for every lesson, I thought, it cannot be. But tonight I saw you count the music.” I laughed and cried together, a sound I did not know I still owned. He pulled a yellowed envelope from his jacket. “This is the sworn statement of the stagehand who helped Hargrove. He gave it to me in 1989.”
A retired teacher learns the truth about the night her ballet career ended, and a famous director makes sure her family finally gives her the best seat in the house.
Hargrove had passed in 1997, Mr. Volkov told me, but he had traced Lorraine Vance to a quiet street in Connecticut. She was eighty one now. Last month she answered his letter with six pages in shaky blue ink. She confessed that she had poured the wax herself, that she had carried it for half a century, and that she wanted to beg my pardon in person if I would allow it. I looked at the envelope a long time. Then I said, “Tell her to come in the spring. I will make tea.”
Then I heard hurried steps on the stairs. Monica came around the pillar, flushed from the lobby, with Philip Jr. behind her and Clara in her stage makeup and a coat thrown over her costume. “Grandma!” Clara said, and she knelt and put her arms around my knees. “Mr. Volkov told me. Why did you never say?” Monica stared at the old man. “Sir, there must be a mistake. This is my mother in law. She sits wherever we put her.” Mr. Volkov rose, very tall, and looked at her with an expression I would not like to see turned on myself. “Then you have placed her very badly.”
He offered me his arm. “Genevieve, will you come down with me?” We took the elevator, which he finally allowed, and he walked me through the stage door while the cast gathered in a circle in their robes. He asked the pianist for the second movement, quietly. Then he said to the company, “This is Genevieve Laurent, who was the finest dancer I ever saw. A wrong was done to her, and the company that did it is the company that I now lead. Tonight I repair it, as far as one can.” Everyone applauded. A girl in the back wiped her eyes with her sleeve.
Philip Jr. found me in the wings a little later. His hands were shaking. “Mom, I did not know any of it. The lessons. The money. I thought Dad left you a pension.” I told him the truth, about the pearls, the jar in the pantry, the twelve years, the eighteen thousand dollars and more. He looked at the floor like a boy. “I should have asked what you needed,” he said. “Yes,” I told him, without unkindness. “You should have.” Monica stood a few steps behind, holding the balcony ticket she had never put in her purse. She did not meet my eyes. She did, finally, say she was sorry.
The company did more than apologize. Mr. Volkov arranged a letter to the board and to the old school, restoring my name in the records. He established the Laurent Scholarship for young dancers who cannot afford lessons, and he asked whether I would teach the first class of it. Twelve eager girls and two shy boys came the next month to a studio on Wornall Road, the same one where Clara began. I stood at the barre with my cane and corrected a wrist. It felt like putting on a coat I had left behind.
On the next Saturday night, an usher in a red jacket met me at the theater door, bowed, and led me to the center of the first row, where a card on the seat read “Reserved for Genevieve Ashcroft.” Beside me sat Philip Jr. in a pressed suit, and Monica, who had asked to come. The orchestra began the second movement. Clara rose onto pointe at center stage and found me with her eyes. I counted along under my breath, five, six, seven, eight, and this time I saw every single step.
Afterward I took the pink satin shoes off the nail in my closet. I did not put them on, because my knee has its own opinions, but I carried them to the theater and gave them to Clara in her dressing room. She held them against her chest. “Grandma, they are warm,” she said. I touched the pearls at my throat. Philip would have been proud of the evening, and of the woman who finally walked into the light. I think, for the first time in fifty seven years, I was proud of her too.
