"After a couple years I guess she decided it'd be all right with God if she made a slight exception and married Condon's son, Jimmy. He took after his old man; he had a degree from the Mass. College of Pharmacy and his lower jaw receded. Maybe his thing did, too. He didn't give her any kids. Or else one of the stories about her was true: she couldn't have any kids. Rumor was that one of those summers she'd had to have an abortion. Not that anyone really ever knew it for sure, so far's I know might've just been one of those nasty little secrets people like to make up about other people, put a little color in their own lives. No law says they have to be true.
"Anyway, Jimmy backed her financially when she started her dancing school. A couple years later he died. Maybe her being over there all the time giving lessons made him feel neglected or something."
The space had been perfect for Miss Jocelyn's gatherings. In the early afternoons, little girls in leotards and pink satin slippers chewed their lips intently as they pirouetted, whirling dust motes through the sunlight slanting through the big two-paned windows looking west over High Street. Late afternoons and weekday evenings, passersby heard the clatter of high school girls learning to tap-dance, making them smile.
Hilliard remembered the Friday evenings and Saturday nights: small crowds of older children ungainly and uneasy between the ages of seven and fourteen. The boys wore blue blazers and thin grey worsted trousers outgrown in the five or six weeks since their careful purchase one or two sizes too large, and ties clipped off-center to their collars. They huddled in a bunch and studied some openly, and boldly; most furtively, surreptitiously and apprehensively the girls across the room. Whispering excitedly and squealing in groups of five or six, in high-necked, short-skirted chiffon versions of long strapless gowns, the girls were learning to gossip. They were already covetous for future nights when they would have proms and they desperately both hoped and feared beautiful bodies and big swaggering boyfriends with half-curled upper lips and pants bulging at the crotch, begging urgently to feel them up; real adventures to tell and tell on one another.
"I guess the Dance Lady was fairly happy, though, with what she'd ended up with. She must've been; seemed like any time of day that you went by you could hear the music up there. She ran it about fifteen years.
Not the brilliant career she'd originally had in mind, but still, that's what life's about: making the best deal you can. If you end up the widow of a sterile chinless husband, with nothing to look forward to but teaching sullen little kids how to dance, instead of as a rich man's plaything named "Mitzi," you live with it.
"My mother's idea was I needed a gentleman's polish and old Lil'd give it to me. It was my idea of torture. Once a week, every week, during the school year. Friday afternoons, when I was seven. Saturday nights when I turned eleven. Until I finally turned thirteen and got parole.
Outlasted both of them, the one who made me go and the one who tried to teach me I still couldn't dance."
The space had stood vacant for three years since the dance lady's death at seventy-six. Hilliard remembered how she'd looked presiding over it: the brassy gold hair and the rail-thin body; the small breasts under the gold lame bodice sometimes askew, and oddly-shaped built-up, the girls reported knowingly, with wadded facial tissue but as high as they had been when she was seventeen. Either her imperial bearing required accompaniment or she feared quiet; she kept the room echoing with music, pounding out tap-practice tunes on an out-of-tune Chickering upright piano; cranking up an old Victrola that used steel needles to scrape Swan Lake, Les Sylphides, Tales of Vienna Woods and vaudeville tunes from her extensive collection of scratchy shellacs, proudly turning up the suitcase-shaped, grey tweed Columbia portable record-player. It remained 'our new, hi'fi, diamond' needle record-player" the six years he attended, groaning out ballads sung by Vaughn Monroe, Teresa Brewer, Vic Damone and Patti Page, the Singin'
Rage, for ballroom instruction.
"It's a pretty big room, though," Hilliard said. "Do we really need all that space? And can we afford it?"
"It is a lot of space," Merrion said, 'and we probably don't really need it. But we can afford it. It's not only more space'n we need; it's more space'n anybody in these parts right now seems to need.
Carnes people aren't giving it away that'd be against their religion.
But they also know that if the dancing-school lady doesn't come back to life or they cough up what it'll cost to partition it, they might not ever find someone who'll rent it. The room is just too fuckin' big."
