Part 2 (1/2)

”Hi, Dad,” he brought out, and somehow managed to go to him and get down on his knees beside him and put his arm around his back. He felt dizzy now, nauseated, and he was crying like his father. ”I hate you,” he whispered too softly for any of them to hear.

His father stayed. He worked long days, in control once more, though occasionally he smoked, pacing in his room nights, or rode off on his motorcycle for an hour or two, and seldom smiled. Nevertheless, in a month he was again reciting poetry for schools and churches and the Grange, and sometimes reading Scripture from the pulpit Sunday mornings. Jack, sitting rigid, hands over his face, was bitterly ashamed of those poems and recitations from the Bible. His father's eyes no longer flashed, he no longer had the style of an actor. Even his gestures were submissive, as pliant as the gra.s.s. Though tears ran down Jack Hawthorne's face-no one would deny that his father was still effective, reading carefully, lest his voice should break. ”Tomorrow's Bridge” and ”This Too Will Pa.s.s”-Jack scorned the poems' opinions, scorned the way his father spoke directly to each listener, as if each were some new woman, his father some mere suffering sheep among sheep, and scorned the way Phoebe and his mother looked on smiling, furtively weeping, heads lifted. Sometimes his father would recite a poem that Jack himself had written, in the days when he'd tried to write poetry, a comic limerick or some maudlin piece about a boy on a hill. Though it was meant as a compliment, Jack's heart would swell with rage; yet he kept silent, more private than before. At night he'd go out to the cavernous haymow or up into the orchard and practice his French horn. One of these days, he told himself, they'd wake up and find him gone.

He used the horn more and more now to escape their herding warmth. Those around him were conscious enough of what was happening-his parents and Phoebe, his uncles, aunts, and cousins, his mother's many friends. But there was nothing they could do. ”That horn's his whole world,” his mother often said, smiling but clasping her hands together. Soon he was playing third horn with the Batavia Civic Orchestra, though he refused to play in church or when company came. He began to ride the Bluebus to Rochester, Sat.u.r.days, to take lessons from Arcady Yegudkin, ”the General,” at the Eastman School of Music.

Yegudkin was seventy. He'd played princ.i.p.al horn in the orchestra of Czar Nikolai and at the time of the Revolution had escaped, with his wife, in a dramatic way. At the time of the purge of Kerenskyites, the Bolsheviks had loaded Yegudkin and his wife, along with hundreds more, onto railroad flatcars, reportedly to carry them to Siberia. In a desolate place, machine guns opened fire on the people on the flatcars, then soldiers pushed the bodies into a ravine, and the train moved on. The soldiers were not careful to see that everyone was dead. Perhaps they did not relish their work; in any case, they must have believed that, in a place so remote, a wounded survivor would have no chance against wolves and cold weather. The General and his wife were among the few who lived, he virtually unmarked, she horribly crippled. Local peasants nursed the few survivors back to health, and in time the Yegudkins escaped to Europe. There Yegudkin played horn with all the great orchestras and received such praise-so he claimed, spreading out his clippings-as no other master of French horn had received in all history. He would beam as he said it, his Tartar eyes flas.h.i.+ng, and his smile was like a thrown-down gauntlet.

He was a barrel-shaped, solidly muscular man, hard as a boulder for all his age. His hair and moustache were as black as coal except for touches of silver, especially where it grew, with majestic indifference to ordinary taste, from his cavernous nostrils and large, dusty-looking ears. The sides of his moustache were carefully curled, in the fas.h.i.+on once favored by Russian dandies, and he was one of the last men in Rochester, New York, to wear spats. He wore formal black suits, a huge black overcoat, and a black fedora. His wife, who came with him and sat on the long maple bench outside his door, never reading or knitting or doing anything at all except that sometimes she would speak unintelligibly to a student-Yegudkin's wife, shriveled and twisted, watched him as if wors.h.i.+pfully, hanging on his words. She looked at least twice the old man's age. Her hair was snow white and she wore lumpy black shoes and long black shapeless dresses. The two of them would come, every Sat.u.r.day morning, down the long marble hallway of the second floor of Killburn Hall, the General erect and imperious, like some sharp-eyed old Slavonic king, moving slowly, waiting for the old woman who crept beside him, gray claws on his coat sleeve, and seeing Jack Hawthorne seated on the bench, his books and French horn in its tattered black case on the floor beside him, the General would extend his left arm and boom, ”Goot mworning!”

Jack, rising, would say, ”Morning, sir.”

”You have met my wife?” the old man would say then, bowing and taking the cigar from his mouth. He asked it each Sat.u.r.day.

”Yes, sir. How do you do?”

The old man was too deaf to play in orchestras anymore. ”What's the difference?” he said. ”Every symphony in America, they got Yegudkins. I have teach them all. Who teach you this? The General!” He would smile, chin lifted, triumphant, and salute the ceiling.

He would sit in the chair beside Jack's and would sing, with violent gestures and a great upward leap of the belly to knock out the high B's and C's-Tee! Tee!-as Jack read through Kopprasch, Gallay, and Kling, and when it was time to give Jack's lip a rest, the General would speak earnestly, with the same energy he put into his singing, of the United States and his beloved Russia that he would nevermore see. The world was at that time filled with Russophobes. Yegudkin, whenever he read a paper, would be so enraged he could barely contain himself. ”In all my age,” he often said, furiously gesturing with his black cigar, ”if the Russians would come to this country of America, I would take up a rifle and shot at them-boof! But the newspapers telling you lies, all lies! You think them dumb fools, these Russians? You think they are big, fat bush-overs?” He spoke of mile-long parades of weaponry, spoke of Russian cunning, spoke with great scorn, a sudden booming laugh, of Napoleon. Jack agreed with a nod to whatever the General said. Nevertheless, the old man roared on, taking great pleasure in his rage, it seemed, sometimes talking like a rabid communist, sometimes like a fascist, sometimes like a citizen helplessly caught between mindless, grinding forces, vast, idiot herds. The truth was, he hated both Russians and Americans about equally, cared only for music, his students and, possibly, his wife. In his pockets, in scorn of the opinions of fools, he carried condoms, dirty pictures, and grimy, wadded-up dollar bills.

One day a new horn he'd ordered from Germany, an Alexander, arrived at his office-a horn he'd gotten for a graduate student. The old man unwrapped and a.s.sembled it, the graduate student looking on-a shy young man, blond, in a limp gray sweater-and the glint in the General's eye was like madness or at any rate l.u.s.t, perhaps gluttony. When the horn was ready he went to the desk where he kept his clippings, his tools for the cleaning and repair of French horns, his cigars, photographs, and medals from the Czar, and pulled open a wide, shallow drawer. It contained perhaps a hundred mouthpieces, of all sizes and materials, from raw bra.s.s to lucite, silver, and gold, from the shallowest possible cup to the deepest. He selected one, fitted it into the horn, pressed the rim of the bell into the right side of his large belly-the horn seemed now as much a part of him as his arm or leg-clicked the s.h.i.+ning keys to get the feel of them, then played. In that large, cork-lined room, it was as if, suddenly, a creature from some other universe had appeared, some realm where feelings become birds and dark sky, and spirit is more solid than stone. The sound was not so much loud as large, too large for a hundred French horns, it seemed. He began to play now not single notes but, to Jack's astonishment, chords-two notes at a time, then three. He began to play runs. As if charged with life independent of the man, the horn sound fluttered and flew crazily, like an enormous trapped hawk hunting frantically for escape. It flew to the bottom of the lower register, the foundation concert F, and crashed below it, and on down and down, as if the horn in Yegudkin's hands had no bottom, then suddenly changed its mind and flew upward in a split-second run to the horn's top E, dropped back to the middle and then ran once more, more fiercely at the E, and this time burst through it and fluttered, manic, in the trumpet range, then lightly dropped back into its own home range and, abruptly, in the middle of a note, stopped. The room still rang, s.h.i.+mmered like a vision.

”Good horn,” said Yegudkin, and held the horn toward the graduate student, who sat, hands clamped on his knees, as if in a daze.

Jack Hawthorne stared at the instrument suspended in s.p.a.ce and at his teacher's hairy hands. Before stopping to think, he said, ”You think I'll ever play like that?”

Yegudkin laughed loudly, his black eyes widening, and it seemed that he grew larger, beatific and demonic at once, like the music; overwhelming. ”Play like me?” he exclaimed.

Jack blinked, startled by the bluntness of the thing, the terrible lack of malice, and the truth of it. His face tingled and his legs went weak, as if the life were rus.h.i.+ng out of them. He longed to be away from there, far away, safe. Perhaps Yegudkin sensed it. He turned gruff, sending away the graduate student, then finis.h.i.+ng up the lesson. He said nothing, today, of the stupidity of mankind. When the lesson was over he saw Jack to the door and bid him goodbye with a brief half-smile that was perhaps not for Jack at all but for the creature on the bench. ”Next Sat.u.r.day?” he said, as if there might be some doubt.

Jack nodded, blus.h.i.+ng.

At the door opening on the street he began to breathe more easily, though he was weeping. He set down the horn case to brush away his tears. The sidewalk was crowded-dazed-looking Sat.u.r.day-morning shoppers herding along irritably, meekly, through painfully bright light. Again he brushed tears away. He'd been late for his bus. Then the crowd opened for him and, with the horn cradled under his right arm, his music under his left, he plunged in, starting home.

STILLNESS.

It would be a strange thing, Joan Orrick often thought, to have second sight, as her grandmother Frazier was supposed to have had. It occurred to her, for instance, one day when she was forty, when Martin stopped the car to wait for a light at the corner of Olive Street and Grand, in St. Louis. They were just pa.s.sing through. Martin had delivered a paper at Urbana, and now they were heading for Norman, Oklahoma, where he was to serve on the jury for something called the Newstadt-Books Abroad Prize. ”What is it?” she'd asked when first the invitation to Oklahoma had come. ”Actually,” he'd said, and had put on his pompous look, then changed his mind, ”G.o.d knows.” ”Maybe we should drive through St. Louis,” she'd said. He'd agreed at once, generous and expansive as he always was when preparing a lecture he thought impressive. She'd been less impressed than she'd pretended, but that was in the past now. And when they'd left Highway 70 and nosed past the arch into the city, she wasn't much impressed by St. Louis either. Beyond the stadium, the scrubbed, unconvincing show of government buildings, the husk of the grand old railroad station where she'd met him all those birthdays and Christmases-the years before he'd gotten his motorcycle-everything was gray, windblown, burnt out. Riding down haunted streets, brooding on the thought of second sight, she was sorry she'd come.

What would she have thought, though-sometime in the late 1940s, standing on this corner, on her way to her part-time accompanist's job at the Duggers School of the Dance-if she'd suddenly had a vision of what downtown St. Louis would be like just twenty-five years later? What would she have thought, what would she have felt, standing on that crowded, noisy corner, if the crowd had suddenly thinned to just three or four hurrying figures and the buildings had gone solemn, like prison or mausoleum walls?

She imagined the vision coming as pure image, like a photograph or drab doc.u.mentary film, with no hint of explanation-saw herself, in her 1940s schoolgirl's clothes, pleated skirt and short-sleeved sweater, dark green coat and light green headscarf, bobbysox and loafers, her hair in a permanent, s.h.i.+ny and curly and a trifle stiff, books in her arm-since she came in directly from school on the bus, or on a chain of buses that shuttled her from Ferguson to Normandy to Wellston to downtown. There had been-was it on this corner?-a wonderful ice-cream place, the Park Plaza, where for a dollar you could get a parfait two feet high, and all around this section there were magnificent theaters, as colorful as circuses, with high, bold marquees on which yellow, red, blue, purple, green, and white lights (lightbulbs, she remembered, and even then the few that had burned out weren't replaced) went racing around tall, urgent t.i.tles-Rope, The Purple Heart, The Return of Frank James-and inside, the theaters were like palaces: great gilded lions; red-velvet-covered three-inch-thick ropes on golden posts; majestic wide stairways that made everyone an instant king or queen; ushers in uniforms from the days of Empire (G.o.d knew which empire); and in the great domed theater itself a hush that was patently religious, the boom of voices from the people on the screen coming from all sides and from within, or so it seemed, oracular.

All the great stores had been downtown then, Famous-Barr, for instance, glittering, high-ceilinged, richly ceremonious inside its towering gold-framed revolving doors-the aisles choked with shoppers, most of them white, the counters and high walls revealing wonders, coats and sombre-toned stately dresses with the sleeves pinned straight out, extended for flight far overhead like hovering angels, and-everywhere-draped artificial-pearl necklaces or ruby-red or pool-ball-green or -blue or -yellow costume baubles, bracelets the color of copper in flame, and everywhere the scent of perfumes and talc.u.ms, newly printed books, the leather of new shoes, a smell as exciting and at the same time cloying as a vault of roses in one of the big downtown flowershops, or the thick, sweet incense in a Catholic church. Suppose in the twinkling of an eye, Joan thought, that whole world had vanished, and the girl on the corner, herself at fifteen, looked, stunned and afraid, at a city gone dark and empty: suppose a silence had fallen, as if all the gay sounds of the world had been abruptly turned off, like the music and static on a radio, and there came the same instant a visual stillness, as if a heart had stopped-no motion but three or four hurrying Negroes, strangely dressed, dangerous, with hair grown long and alarmingly puffed up, nothing else stirring but two pigeons overhead and a newspaper blowing along the pavement. ”I'm in the future!” the imaginary Joan would finally have realized, ”and there's been some terrible war, or a plague, and everything's been ruined.”

Who'd await the future if she could see it in advance? No use to tell the girl on the corner, ”We're happy, Joan. Don't be afraid! There are beautiful places, though this one may be gone.” She'd have backed away, frightened and betrayed-yes, terrified, of course. What else could she be, addressed by a strange, wild woman in dark gla.s.ses such as Negroes wore then in the most dangerous parts of East St. Louis, a fur coat that looked as if the lynx had died of terror, adrenaline exploding, every hair on end-a woman whose beauty was like fine cutlery, hair falling plain as an Indian's, except red, as brightly burnished and fiery as her own-leaning from the window of a dark blue Mercedes Benz driven by-how weird!-a sorrowful, baggy-eyed man with silver hair that swept down like angelhair to his heavy, hunched shoulders-a monster who was, she had a feeling, suddenly, someone she was meant to recognize.

The girl would have stepped back in fear and anger, raising her hand to the braces on her teeth, and the real Joan would have called to her, shouting past the dead years in pity and anguish, ”Child, child, don't be silly! We're as harmless as you are, we've betrayed n.o.body, nothing! Look at us!” Now the child did look, and recognition came: the rich, wildly eccentric lady (who had beautiful teeth, Joan thought, and smiled, feeling a surge of affection for the big-nosed innocent on the corner), the lady in the fur, with emeralds and a ruby and a diamond on her fingers, was herself-her own ”child,” Wordsworth would say-and the driver was Buddy Orrick, grown sadder and crazier, but still alive, and married to her: so they'd made it, they'd survived! She came a step nearer, her face eager, full of questions (We could drive her to Duggers, the real Joan thought; it's only a few blocks) and her small hand came cautiously toward the real Joan's hand on the Mercedes' wing-window, both hands equally pale and solid, the child's and the woman's, until suddenly the child's hand was gone and Joan Orrick was gazing at a cracked sidewalk, a piece of dirty cardboard: Fragile.

Martin glanced over and saw her tears. ”Hurting?” he asked.

Yes, she was hurting, as she nearly always hurt these days, sometimes such pain that she pa.s.sed out for a moment-hurting even when the drugs were at work, as now, causing visions, or almost-visions-but she said, ”No,” and gave him a rea.s.suring smile, ”just thinking.”

He reached over, touched her hand. The light changed, and the car glided forward without a sound.

She said, ”The Duggers School of the Dance was just up ahead. Remember?”

”Which building?” He ducked down over the steering wheel to look.

She pointed as the car came abreast of it. It had been gutted by fire, like most of the buildings in this neighborhood. He scanned the boarded-up, blackened storefronts. She could see he wasn't sure which one she meant.

Jacqui Duggers was tiny, the cla.s.sic teacher of ballet but in perfect miniature, hair so tightly drawn back you might have thought from a distance that it was paint, as on a j.a.panese doll. She spoke with the accent all ballet teachers use, even those raised in Milwaukee or St. Louis, wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist like an actress, called Joan ”dahling” with perfect seriousness and unfeigned affection, though one failed to notice the affection at first, since she was always hurried, always slightly tense, as if in half an hour she must catch a plane for Munich or Paris. She was-or so it seemed to Joan-a superb dancer, though Joan never saw her dance more than a few steps. Her old photographs seemed to confirm the impression: the Jacqui Duggers in the pictures had that authority one sees at a glance in professionals, and they proved she had danced with good companies of the so-called second rank in both the United States and Canada. ”Ah wone,” she would say, and Joan's hands would move automatically on the keys of the piano.

Her husband, Pete Duggers, taught tap-dance in the mirror-walled studio below. He was nearly as small as she was, but thicker, almost stout, in fact, and he looked and moved like some Disney cartoon of a tap-dance teacher. He had a red face and wonderfully merry blue eyes, wore vests and old-fas.h.i.+oned arm-elastics. If he ever touched the floor when he walked (and he did), Joan had been prepared to believe that he did so by whim. Jacqui's movements at the barre had a look not of lightness, cancellation of gravity, but of eloquent, powerful control, as if her muscles were steel and could no more speed up or slow down against her will than the hands of a clock could escape the inclinations of its mainspring. Rising on her toes in the middle of the room-a brief jerk and click as the heel and ankle locked, a brief trembling like a spasm, then the firmness of an iron wedge-she gave the impression that touching her calf or thigh would be like touching a wall. Pete's dancing feet moved, on the other hand, as if swinging by themselves, as if his body were suspended like a puppet's from invisible wires. His taps were light and quick, as if he never put his weight down with either foot, and they rattled out around him as gaily and casually-and as unbelievably fast-as the fingers of his Negro piano player, a tall, flat-haired boy who sat sprawling in his chair with his head laid far over so that he seemed to be always, except for his forearms and fingers, fast asleep. The speed and lightness with which Pete Duggers danced were amazing to behold, but what was truly miraculous, so that it made you catch your breath, was the way he could stop, completely relaxed, leaning his elbow on empty air and grinning as if he'd been standing there for hours, all that movement and sound you'd been hearing pure phantom and illusion. That was unfailingly the climax when he danced: a slow build, with elegant shuffles and turns, then more speed, and more, and more and still more until it seemed that the room spun drunkenly, crazily, all leading-direct as the path of an arrow-to nothing, or everything, a sudden stillness like an escape from reality, a sudden floating, whether terrible or wonderful she could never tell: an abrupt hush as when a large crowd looks up, all at the same moment, and sees an eagle in the sky, almost motionless, or then again, perhaps, the frightening silence one read about in novels when a buzz-bomb shut off over London. He stood perfectly still, the piano was still, his young students gaped, and then abruptly reality came back as the piano tinkled lightly and he listlessly danced and, as he did so, leaned toward his students and winked. ”You see? Stillness! That's the magic!”

Olive Street was already going down at that time, so the storefront was shoddy, solo dancer and dance-cla.s.s pictures on the windows, big, vulgar stars, the gla.s.s around the pictures crudely painted dark blue, as if the Duggers School of the Dance were some miserable third-rate establishment not worth breaking into or stealing from, though the door was not locked. But that was a trick-the dancing Duggers had trunkfuls of tricks: artists to the marrow of their chipped and splintered bones. The scuffed, unpainted door in front opened into a scuffed, unpainted entryway with a door to the left and a knotty, crooked stairway leading upward. On the door to the left, a sign said ”TAP DANCE STUDIO,” and above the worn railing at the side of the stairs, a sign, c.o.c.ked parallel to the railing, said ”SCHOOL OF THE BALLET .” When you opened the door to the tap-dance studio for the first time, you did a mighty double-take: there were glittering mirrors with round-arched tops and etched designs of the sort Joan would occasionally discover years later in the oldest London pubs, and above the mirrors there were walls of red and gold and a magnificent stamped-tin ceiling. In fact she'd never completely gotten over her surprise at the elegance inside, though she'd worked there four years, into her college days. It was a large building, at one time a theater. The tap-dance studio-and the ballet studio directly above it-took up the first thirty feet; then there was a railing, also red and gold, from which one looked out at the long, wide ballroom floor, at the front an enormous stage boxed off by ratty, stiff wine-colored velvet curtains, along the side walls candelabra between high, painted panels-dancing graces, Zeus in majesty, nymphs and satyrs, peac.o.c.ks and fat reclining nudes done in highly unsuccessful imitation of the late style of Rubens.

She'd walked there once with Martin-in those days ”Buddy”-when he'd motorcycled in from his college in Indiana and had offered to drive her to work in her father's De Soto. He'd driven fast, as usual, his eyes rolling up to the rear-view mirror, on the look-out for police cars, and had gotten her to work much too early.

”Care to have an interesting experience?” she'd said.

Their footsteps echoed. The ballroom was half dark. They could just make out the carved figures on the ceiling, two storeys up, circling around the empty s.p.a.ces from which once had hung huge chandeliers.

”It's like a church,” he said. He had a crewcut. Leather jacket. He hung his cigarette off his lip like Marlon Brando. Already he'd written two novels-unpublishable; terrible, in fact, though of course she hadn't said so. She was convinced, in spite of them, that he'd someday be famous, someday when he'd given up James Joyce.

She'd squeezed his hand and they'd stopped and, after a moment, kissed, then walked on, up to the front of the ballroom and up onto the stage, where the Duggers students gave their dance recitals. They looked up at the shuttered lights, ropes, catwalks-it was darker here, spooky, as if the stage machinery belonged not only to a different time but to a different planet. Again they paused to kiss, and he put his arms around her and after a minute she moved his hand to the front of her sweater, then under the sweater to her breast. With his usual difficulty, for all his practice, he unsnapped her bra. She felt her nipples rising, and he pressed closer to her. With a grandiose sweep of his free arm in the direction of the dim, ghost-filled hall, he whispered, ”Lady, how would you like to be f.u.c.ked, right here in front of all these people?”

”Hmm,” she said. After a moment, still with his hand on her breast, her hand keeping it there, she led him toward the further wing and the small door opening on a room she'd discovered weeks earlier, half filled with crates, electric wire, old tools, cobwebs, the rotting frames of old sets. Here and there stood old pieces of furniture-chairs, tables, couches-protected from the dust by tarpaulins. ”Maybe we need a rehearsal,” she said. They pa.s.sed under a high window through which a single crack of light came and she glanced at her watch. Fifteen minutes. She stood looking around, both his hands on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, until he finally noticed the couch and went over and pulled away the tarpaulin. As he came into her, huge and overeager, as always-but so was she, so was she-she said, ”Isn't this an interesting experience?”

She glanced at Martin-Buddy middle-aged. He stared past the steering wheel, professional, absentminded. They'd slipped from his thoughts already, those years, the Duggers. His hands on the wheel were soft, almost fat, though still strong. She looked at his face. ”What are you thinking?” she said.

Martin flicked his eyes open, half apologetic. ”Nothing,” he said. ”Something Athene tells Odysseus. Nothing.” He looked suddenly embarra.s.sed.

She glanced out the window again, then reached for her purse, opening it, fumbling for a pill.

”Hurting again?”

Her mouth tightened in annoyance at that ”again.” ”Just tired,” she said.

”We should have taken a plane,” he said, and ducked to look up past the buildings.

The sky was gray, luminous and still, like Lake Erie from one of those hushed, abandoned beaches. She thought of Jacqui Duggers.

”There's still a little coffee in the thermos,” Martin said.

”Coffee?”

”To help swallow the pill.”

”Oh. No, it's done.” His helplessness cheered her. ”Odysseus,” she thought. Homer had been the subject of his lecture at Urbana. She smiled a little sadly. So he was wis.h.i.+ng, as usual, that he might talk about himself. Not that he would do it; he had far too much taste. And she, for her part ... She shook her head and smiled again.

The whole left side of the building, as you entered from the street, was the Duggers' apartment. It was the most beautiful apartment she'd ever seen, though not as original or even as spectacularly tasteful as she'd imagined at the time. She would see many like it in San Francisco, and far more elegant examples of white-on-white in London and Paris. Everything was white, the walls, the furniture, the chains holding up the chandeliers, the wooden shutters on the windows. Against all that white, the things they'd collected stood out in bold relief: paintings, presumably by friends, all very curious and impressive, at least to Joan-smudges, bright splashes of color, one canvas all white with little scratches of gray and bright blue; sculptures-a beautiful abstraction in dark wood, a ballet dancer made out of pieces of old wire, museum reproductions, a mobile of wood and stainless steel; books and records, shelves upon shelves of them. Their record-player was the largest she'd ever seen and had a speaker that stood separate from the rest. Once when Jacqui invited her in, to write Joan her check for her week's work, Jacqui, leading the way to the kitchen, stopped suddenly, turned a ballerina's step, and said, ”Joanie, I must show you my shoes, no?” ”I'd like to see them,” Joan said. Jacqui swept over to the side of the room, her small hand gracefully flying ahead of her, and pushed open a white sliding door. Joan stared. On tilted shelves that filled half the room's wall, Jacqui had three hundred pairs of tiny shoes. She had all colors-gold and silver, yellow, red, green, some with long ties as bright as new ribbons, some with little bows, some black and plain as the inside of a pocket. ”Where'd you get all these?” Joan said. Jacqui laughed. ”Mostly Paris,” she said. She gave Joan a quick, appraising look, then laughed again. ”Dahling, Paris you are going to love. There is a store, a department store, Au Printemps. When you go there, blow a kiss for Jacqui!” She rolled her eyes heavenward. ”Ah, ze French!”