Dancers in the Dark. Dorothy Speare
Corners,” she said slowly. “And you look like that—and have pep like that—and can sing enough so that you ought to go somewhere really good and take a jab at it. Joy, tell me—what in the name of the Seven Sutherland Sisters, is the thing that keeps you in Foxhollow Corners?”
Joy stopped on the threshold. “Why—I don’t know. I really—don’t know.”
“Is it a man?”
“No. There are no men—to speak of.”
“Well—come back here a minute and let me tell you something that’s been percolating through my Sarah Brum ever since I heard you sing way last night—you won’t miss much for a second or so, these breakfast parties are always long ones especially when the stags are edged——”
The mention of edged stags brought Joy back into the room.
“Look here, Joy, I like you. I don’t usually like girls, either. I don’t like Sal much, and I live with her most of the time. But I like you. Look here—I want you to think over leaving Foxhollow Corners. Sal and I have an apartment down in Boston. I know a good teacher there who would trot you through anything you needed. You don’t look like the type of girl who puts in a lifetime of watchful waiting in the home town. Think it over.”
“You mean think over coming to Boston——”
“And living with us. I’ll give you my address before we kiss this brain-factory good-bye, and then you can let me know—at any time, understand?”
A shadow fell across the door. It was Sarah, who, completely jazzed out, came in with hardly a look, much less a salutation, for the two girls.
“Hello, Sal,” said Jerry comfortably. “I’m asking Joy to come down to Boston and live with us.”
Sarah wheeled with an incredibly swift motion, and looked first to one girl, then to the other. Then she spoke. “Oh—indeed!” she drawled; and the echo of her voice lingered forever in the air.
II
In a house that was a mass of Mid-Victorian odds and ends, retrospection of the dizzy whirl of Prom was unsettling. Nailed-down carpets, red velvet furniture with lace tidies, antimacassars and ponderous what-nots, cast a veil over jazz, jazzy flirtation, and jazzy routine of life—the sort of veil that enhances while deadening the sharpness of what it is thrown over. Time seemed to have halted some sixteen years ago in the Nelson household and rested with stationary breath among the old family portraits, with the death of Joy’s mother—a lovely, radiant mother, so everyone said, who would have been a sympathetic and understanding companion to her daughter during her girlhood.
Outside his business, which was very successful, Mr. Nelson lived in the gallant days of ’80’s and ’90’s, when the ordered world shone with smug serenity. He sat in his study and read back into Victorian times every evening. Joy had early learned to regard him as a figure remotely and theoretically pleasant, like Oliver Wendell Holmes or William James—a figure to be acknowledged and respected, but with whom she had little in common.
The only really beautiful thing in the house that time could not turn bizarre, was the grand piano that Joy’s mother had left behind. It stood in one corner of the high-ceilinged, wax-floored parlour, and Joy had played on it and sung with it ever since she had been so small that she had to be lifted on to the stool and held there while her baby fingers struck the loving keys and she crooned strange, tuneless accompaniments. Her mother had been a singer who had forgotten her voice when she met George Nelson … and Joy had been told that she was the latest of generations of wonderful voices. They rang in her mind and soul at times—hauntingly sweet, sweetly insistent. She was the heir of all the ages! All the beauty of their dead song was merged into her—what was she going to do with these riches? But when the voices became too insistent, Joy had always drawn back. She was queerly ashamed of “having a voice.” In Foxhollow Corners, people who did that sort of thing too much “got boring.” She wanted to be a real girl, to do the things real girls did, and to have a Prince Charming waiting at the end of the golden trail of girlhood.
And now the Prince Charming was no more. He was struck from her vision with rude completeness. There were moments when she mourned the loss of her ideal as a maiden mourns the loss of her innocence; but for the most part the vivid colouring of Prom shut out its dark hours. She had had a wonderful time at breakfast. Tom had gone to bed, and the stags were just starting on their second wind. They had piled into an automobile and gone rattling about the country, loudly singing “snappy” bits of ragtime in close harmony, waking everyone “in time for their morning’s work.” If Prince Charmings had gone from the world, there still was left the satisfactory substitute of high-hearted youth who would have a good time even if romance had died.
To come back to Foxhollow Corners was razing the mountain of delight that had been mounting higher and higher ever since she had left Foxhollow Corners. The girls were all so uninteresting. After Jerry’s plangency, they only contributed to the flatness of things. All they did was to embroider or go to the movies, or walk down town to see what was going on, under cover of a sundae. And those of the men who were not away all the year at college, had been put in their place by Tom as “a buncha fruits.”
And above all, there was nothing to do—absolutely nothing to do if you didn’t do it with the other girls. Joy played ragtime on the scandalized grand piano, and thought over Jerry’s words. … Life with Jerry, and studying singing from a real teacher! It was a thought with which to toy. Of course, when it came right down to it, she could not go. Jerry and Sarah were too different—the New Englander in her cried out against their careless ways, and shrank from the thought of being uprooted from her native soil. And when the New Englander would give way to the French strain that was her mother’s ancestors, and her blood danced in her veins at the thought of liberation from Foxhollow Corners—there was always the chilling consideration of what her father would have to say on the subject. He regarded her as something that could be put away or taken out at leisure—and for him to find that she was outside the limits he had given her, might prove revolutionary.
And then one morning at breakfast while she was fidgeting over her prunes, her father himself threw the bomb of revolution across the table:
“Joy, my child, I have been made executor of a will.”
Joy looked up vaguely from her prunestones.
“An old friend who may, or may not, have known that it would be inconvenient for me to go to California at this time. Yes, the estate is in California—I shall have to leave the first of the month.”
“How long will you be gone?” Joy asked, and a little fever of excitement began to burn within her.
“I’m sure I cannot prophesy—these affairs are sometimes indefinite in the extreme.” He frowned over his soft-boiled egg, and the fever within her quickened, as she began to vision the possibilities of this departure.
“Were you—were you thinking of taking me with you?” she asked, with no desire warming her voice.
“It would not be particularly desirable. I know that fathers do take their daughters unchaperoned upon trips with them, but I should prefer not to have you with me. I may have to be travelling constantly”—he heaved a sigh—“and I would not know where or with whom to leave you. Yet that question faces me here as well. I could not leave you alone in this house. And there are no relations nearer than your New York cousins.”
Joy’s blood was pounding. The New Englander in her rejoiced that she was not to be torn from her own shores to Pacific sea lines; and the gay little French strain sang that here was her chance that might never be heaped so invitingly before her again! She opened her mouth to speak, but the prunestones in front of her balked the phrase trembling upon her lips. They looked so solid—so unchanging. How could she taste the savour of opportunity, surrounded by prunestones?
And while she hesitated—a little