Beauty is gone, Wayne thought. Beauty is gone and beauty is never coming back and it has not even been here yet. Just like Wally Michelin wanting to sing the “Cantique de Jean Racine” when they were little more than children. A thing could depart before it reached you in the first place. There were things like that. The “Cantique” was one, and beauty was another.
“Fuck, Warford, headlights.”
The lights arced across the bushes and glinted on Warford’s jagged bottle over Wayne’s closed eyes. If he opened his eyes he would have to stop thinking about beauty and start thinking about sight. Whether he wanted to lose that or not. Warford could do it in one lurch. Then it wouldn’t matter if beauty was gone forever. Wayne’s own eyelids, then air the thickness of one more set of eyelids, lay between the broken bottle and his eyeballs.
“Fuckin headlights.”
“Fuck, man, what’s wrong with you? That’s only Jesus Graham fucking Morrisey what does he know? He’s got his head so far up Tina Payne’s cunt he don’t care about no little girl we got here. No little monster fucking girl with hairy tits and — what has she got down there, Fifield? A cunt or what? Too bad we haven’t got a camera. See, what I’m interested in is which one of us has the guts to fuck this here little girl.”
“Don’t go looking at me.”
“What about you, Broderick? Come on. Get your fingers ready. You can go at it with your fingers first, then unpack your cock. Come on.”
“Fuck off, man.”
“Or one of these Sweet Marie bars. What about that? Come on, Fifield, what’s wrong with you? Too bad we didn’t get one of those black corncobs off Mary Fifield’s front door — that’d be just like a big nigger cock we could use. Go get it, Fifield; it’s your aunt’s door. Big fucking Jesus nigger cock.”
“Come off it, Warford.”
“That’s what she wants.”
“Give it up.”
“I mean, why would anybody want to be a little girl when they didn’t have to, unless they wanted to get fucked?”
“Come off it.”
“That’s what it’s all about, folks. That’s the name of the game. See here, boys, what you got here is a real, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
28
The Costume Bank
DARK GREEN VELVET, almost black, caught light from the costume-bank ceiling, and there was muslin too, and lace, some of it handmade. Wally Michelin had learned the different kinds of fabric in her aunt’s shop, and she liked knowing their names and their quality. Before she had come to work in Boston she had not thought about whether her own clothing, or that of her mother, her neighbours and classmates, had been made well or thrown together cheaply. Even the dress she had worn to her prom, with its tailoring and its red satin, was not, she saw now, like the satin dresses here. These had more weight and felt colder against her skin. She still had her satin dress from the prom. It hung in her closet in Croydon Harbour under a dry-cleaning bag. She still had the white rose too, dried and pinned to its piece of fern, in the top drawer of her bureau, beside the red cummerbund Wayne Blake had given her that night. She knew why he had given it to her. She felt it was his way of saying he was sorry for everything that had happened. He was sorry his father had destroyed the Ponte Vecchio, and mortified that Donna Palliser had destroyed Wally’s voice and her dreams, and he did not know how to bring any of it back, though he wanted to bring it all back with a longing that was beyond words. But now the cummerbund was stored away in a drawer full of past things, and here, in this many-textured room, hung the present.
The costume bank was not big but it contained all the dresses and trappings for stage performances put on by the Berklee College of Music’s theatre and music performance sections. The room was too small, really, and as she made her way through the costumes, which hung from racks strung from the ceiling, the velvet and lace brushed Wally’s face, her shoulders, and her hands, and she felt like someone in a story from the Arabian Nights, passing through the doorway of a veiled tent, magical and starlit. She had begun working here in April, two hours a week on Saturdays, doing an inventory of the costumes in time for school to start in the fall. She had to find worn elbows and hems, torn seams, and anything else that would require mending, and she also had to pull out any garments that were too far gone and label them for discarding. Her aunt had got her this job because she knew the school’s costume mistress, who regularly came into the shop looking for trimmings and tailoring supplies. Wally had learned quickly in her aunt’s shop, and the costume mistress liked her. There would be no pay but Wally would earn tuition credits so that if she wanted to take Berklee courses when they started up in September, she could do so at a fraction of what it would normally cost.
“You don’t have to do it,” her aunt said. “If you want to take courses without doing the work, we can get you into some courses. If we got you as far as Wimpole Street in London we can get you to Boylston Street.”
“I want to,” Wally said. She knew singers had worn the costumes onstage. Musical notes would have fallen into the cloth, and the musicians’ bodies had touched the dresses and had left their shape in the shoulders and bodices. There was a nearness, touching the velvet and lace, to what she herself had wanted to be, and she could not resist a chance to handle the garments that had been worn by students who sang, even if she could not sing herself.
Thomasina Baikie had gone, in the first week of the previous September, to visit the Harley Street Voice Clinic as Wally and her aunt had requested. They had found Thomasina not at the Cale Street Hostel nor at the Cadogan Hotel, but at the other hotel, the one near Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, a hotel Thomasina had not named. Wally’s aunt had inquired on the telephone and found out the names of a dozen hotels near Poets’ Corner and had phoned seven of them. At the George Hotel the concierge had promised to give Thomasina their message on her arrival on August twenty-ninth, and he had done this.
Thomasina visited the Harley Street Voice Clinic, which was a private clinic and immaculate, she reported to Wally and her aunt. There was an original painting by J. M. W. Turner on the wall of the reception hall, and a sculpture by Henry Moore under a skylight. The doctor who looked at the information Thomasina presented to him on Wally’s behalf had not promised he could repair Wally’s voice. There was not enough information, he said, on the exact damage done to her vocal cords, and a lot of time had passed. He would need magnetic resonance imaging and he would need to see Wally for himself.
Wally and her aunt had made an appointment for February. From the week she had begun working in her aunt’s shop Wally had saved her wages, and by February she had the fare to England and the fee for a consultation, but not for any treatment.
“You let us worry about that,” her aunt had said, and Wally remembered how her mother always said Aunt Doreen and her husband had more money between the two of them than they knew what to do with. They had accounts and investments up to their ears, Ann Michelin had said; Doreen did not even have to run that shop if she didn’t want to. She could quit the shop tomorrow and live out the rest of her days with a mouth full of caviar. Wally had not seen her aunt eat caviar and she had not seen her uncle at all. But there was a maid who came on Wednesdays. Wally had seen her in the doorway of her aunt’s bedroom changing the linen, a new blue-white sheet billowing in a breeze from the open window.