Death in the Fifth Position Read online

  “My God … it’s Jim,” said Haddock, recognizing me at last. He patted my arm, spilling my drink in the process. “Here … I’m sorry … let me fix it for you.” And he dried my sleeve and cuff with his handkerchief, after which he carefully folded the handkerchief and put it away … to suck on later, I decided, in case he ran out of the stuff in the flask.

  “I don’t suppose you two have seen each other in a long time,” said Mr. Washburn.

  “Not in a coon’s age,” said Mr. Haddock, looking at me fondly with those foggy blue eyes of his. “Right in the middle of the news, too, aren’t you, Jim? Wonderful place for a young man to be when a hot story breaks … and such a story! Falling sandbag kills opera star in the first act of Lakmé … one of the dullest operas, by the way, I have ever sat through. I mean if it had to ruin an opera it might just as well have been that one, don’t you agree, Mr. Bing?” At that point I gave Mr. Washburn the high sign and we quietly crept away while the dean of New York drama critics had a chat with himself about the relative merits of the great operas.

  “Why didn’t you warn me?” asked Mr. Washburn.

  “How could I? I didn’t even know you knew him … after all, he never covers the ballet.”

  “He did a story on Ella, thought he’d come by and have a chat. Awful experience.” Mr. Washburn shuddered as we stood and watched the last half of Eclipse run smoothly to its spectacular end. The audience ate it up and, beside me in the dark, I could hear Mr. Washburn applauding.

  Jed Wilbur met us backstage; he looked less harried than usual and I supposed that the success of his ballet had bucked him up considerably.

  “It is very, very fine,” said Mr. Washburn, slowly, taking Wilbur’s right hand in both of his and looking at him with an expression of melting admiration and wonder … the four star treatment.

  “Glad you liked it,” said Jed, in his high thin voice.

  “Glad they liked it, too. Did you see the notices the new girl, Garden, received? Gratifying, very gratifying.”

  “She danced well … but the part! Ah, Jed, you have never made such a fine ballet before in your whole life.”

  “It isn’t bad,” said Wilbur with that freedom from modesty and the commoner forms of polite behavior which makes dance people so refreshing and, at times, so intolerable. “I thought the pas de deux went well tonight.”

  “Lyric!” exclaimed Mr. Washburn as though all words but that accurate one had failed him.

  “But the corps de ballet was a little ragged, I thought.”

  “They are not used to such dynamic work.”

  “By the way, I’m ready to talk about the new ballet.”

  “Have you really thought it out? … will it be ready by the time we open in Chicago?”

  “I think so … I’m ready to begin rehearsals, if you are.”

  “What music? Something old and classical, I hope. They are the best, you know, the masters.”

  “A little piece by Poulenc … you’ll have no trouble getting the rights.”

  Mr. Washburn sighed, thinking of royalties to a living composer. “My favorite modern,” he said bravely.

  “I knew you’d be pleased. I’m calling the ballet Martyr … very austere, very direct.”

  “Brilliant title … but it’s not, well, political, is it? I mean this isn’t the best time … you know what I mean.”

  “Are you trying to censor me?” Jed Wilbur stood very straight and noble, nostrils flared.

  “Now, Jed, you know I’m the last person in the world to do such a thing. Why, I put the artist’s integrity ahead of everything … you know that, Peter here knows that.”

  “Yes, sir,” I murmured.

  “But what is it about, Jed?”

  “Exactly what the title says.”

  “But who is the Martyr?”

  “A girl … It’s all about a family.”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Washburn, relieved. “Marvelous theme … seldom done in ballet. Only Tudor, perhaps, has done it well.”

  “This is better than Tudor.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “What happens in the ballet—what’s the argument?”

  “It’s very simple,” said Jed Wilbur, smiling. “The girl is murdered.”

  Mr. Washburn’s eyebrows went up in surprise; mine went down in a scowl. “Murdered? Do you think, under the circumstances, that’s a … well, an auspicious theme for this company?”

  “I can always take it to the Ballet Theater.”

  “But, my dear boy, I wasn’t suggesting you not do it, or that you change the theme. I was only suggesting that, perhaps, in the light of recent events …”

  “It would be fabulous,” said the dedicated Mr. Wilbur, revealing an unexpected sense of the commercial for one so pure.

  “Well, you’re the doctor,” said Mr. Washburn jovially. “Who will you need?”

  “Most of the company.”

  “Eglanova?”

  “I don’t think so … unless she would play the part of the girl’s mother.”

  “She wouldn’t do it, I’m afraid. You can use Carole for that, the heavy one … she’s good in character. What about the girl?”

  “Garden, I think,” said Wilbur, and I found myself liking him: what a break this would be for Jane—to have a new ballet made for her by a choreographer like Jed Wilbur! Things were looking up. “I’ll need all the boys. Louis can be her husband … a very good part for him, by the way … lot of fire. Then there are two brothers and her father. One brother plays games with her … they have, as children, an imaginary world all their own. The boy is a dreamer and he loses her to the other brother who is a man of action who loses her at last to Louis. But, of course, all the time, she belongs to her father (a good part for old Kazanian by the way) and her mother hates her. When she marries Louis there is terrible trouble in the family … a little like Helen of Troy, perhaps, and, to end the trouble, the girl is murdered.”

  “Who murders her?” asked Mr. Washburn.

  “The father, of course,” said Jed Wilbur evenly.

  Neither of us said anything for a moment. Then Mr. Washburn chuckled. “Obscure motivation, isn’t it?”

  “No, very classical … guilt, jealousy, incest.”

  “Wouldn’t he be more inclined to kill the girl’s husband?” I suggested, appalled at the implications.

  “He was a rational man … he realized that the boy was only fulfilling his nature … the boy had no connection with him; the girl had; the girl betrayed him and the brothers … the mother, too.”

  “I’ll be very interested to see how you work this out,” said Mr. Washburn with greater control than I would have had, similarly confronted.

  “By the way,” I said to Wilbur, “the Globe wants to know if you have any statement to make about this Communist deal.”

  “Tell them I’m not a Communist … that two boards have cleared me already.” Wilbur seemed more relaxed now and I wondered why … after all, the pickets were at this very moment marching up and down the street outside with placards denouncing not only him but us. We found out soon enough. “I’ve been signed to do the new Hayes and Marks musical this fall.… You can tell the Globe that.” And Mr. Wilbur marched off in the direction of Louis’ dressing room.

  “I guess that clears him,” I said. Hayes and Marks, sometimes known collectively as Old Glory, are the most successful, the most reactionary musical comedy writers on Broadway. To be hired by them is a proof of one’s patriotism, loyalty and professional success.

  “The little bastard,” said Mr. Washburn, lapsing for the first time in my brief acquaintance with him, into the argot of the street. “I knew there’d be trouble when I hired him. I was warned.”

  “What difference does it make? You’ve got at least one good ballet out of him and by the time you open with Martyr in New York next year the whole scandal will be forgotten. From what I hear the police are going to arrest Miles any minute.”

  “I wonder why they don’t?”
mused Mr. Washburn, suggesting also for the first time that a member of his company might, after all, have been guilty of murder. It was obvious this exchange with Wilbur had shaken him.

  “I know why,” I said boldly.

  “You know?”

  “It’s those shears … they aren’t sure about them … they can’t figure what my role in all this is.”

  “I’m sure that’s not the reason.”

  “Then what is?”

  “I don’t know … I don’t know.” Mr. Washburn looked worried as the dancers trooped noisily by, costumed for Scheherazade. “Oh,” he said, as we both watched one blonde trick march past us, rolling her butt, “Lady Edderdale is giving a party for the ballet tonight … just principals, no photographers, except hers, of course. You be there, too, black tie … right after the last ballet. I’m not so sure that it’s a good policy to be going out to parties so soon after an accident, but she’s much too important a patron to pass up.”

  I was thrilled, I have to admit. She gives the best parties in New York … a Chicago meat heiress married to a title … I wondered idly if I might find myself a rich wife at the party—every wholesome boy’s dream of heaven. Thinking of marriage, I asked Mr. Washburn whether Eglanova was married at the moment or not.

  He laughed. “She has a Mexican divorce at the moment … I know it far a fact because I helped her get it when we were playing Mexico City.”

  “Who was she married to then?”

  “Don’t you know? I thought you would have noticed it in her biography … but, no, come to think of it, we haven’t used it in the program for nearly five years. She was married to Alyosha Rudin.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1

  Once a Lady always a Lady, as the saying goes; especially in the case of Alma Shellabarger of Chicago who married the Marquis of Edderdale when she was twenty and then at twenty-four married someone else and after that someone else and so on until now, at fifty, she had no husband, though she still uses the title of Marchioness in spite of all the other names she has been called along the way. No one seems to mind, however, because she gives great parties even though her income is not as large now as it was when she appeared in the fashionable world with a face like a bemused horse and all that Shellabarger cash, from slaughtered pigs and sheep. Nevertheless, her blood-drenched income is adequate … though there is no longer the Paris house or the Amalfi villa or the Irish castle … only the Park Avenue mansion and the Palm Beach house, where lavish parties are given, in season. I am told that at her dinners neither pig nor sheep is served, only poultry, fish and game … real sense of guilt as any analyst would tell you at the drop of a fee.

  Mr. Washburn and I arrived before the rest of our company. As a rule, he waits until Eglanova is ready and then he escorts her; but tonight, for some reason, he couldn’t wait to get out of the theater. Both of us were hot in our tuxedos … his white and mine black, an obvious clue to our respective incomes. Fortunately, the house was cool … a gust of freshened air met us in the downstairs hall, a vast room with grey marble columns, marble floor and Greek statuary in niches. A footman took our invitations and led us up a flight of stairs where, so help me, a butler announced our names to a hundred or so decorative guests in a drawing room which looked like the waiting room at Penn Station redecorated by King Midas … the guests looked as though they might be waiting for trains, too, I thought, as we moved toward our hostess who stood beneath a chandelier at the room’s center, all in green and diamonds, receiving her guests with a half-smile and mumbled greetings as though she weren’t quite sure why she was there, or why they were there.

  “Dear Alma,” said Mr. Washburn, beginning to expand as he always does in the presence of money.

  “Ivan!” They embraced like two mechanical toys, like those figures which come out of old-fashioned clocks every hour on the hour. I bowed over her hand in the best Grand Saint Petersburg Ballet style.

  “You poor dear,” said Alma, fixing my employer with yellow eyes. “What a disaster!”

  “We must take the good with the bad,” said Mr. Washburn gently.

  “I was there!” breathed Alma Edderdale, shutting her eyes for a moment as though to recall, as vividly as possible, every detail of that terrible night.

  “Then you know what it was like …”

  “I do … I do.”

  “The ghastly fall …”

  “Can I ever forget?”

  “The end of a life … a great ballerina’s life.”

  “If there was only something one could do.” That did it, I thought. Mr. Washburn would immediately suggest an Ella Sutton Memorial Ballet, sets, costumes and choreographer’s fee to be paid by that celebrated patroness, the Marchioness of Edderdale. But Mr. Washburn is as tactful as he is venal.

  “We all feel that way, Alma.” Then he paused significantly.

  “Perhaps … but we’ll talk of that another time. Tell me about him.”

  “About whom?”

  “The husband. The … well, you know what they say.”

  “Ah … quite broken up,” said Mr. Washburn evasively, and I withdrew, moving toward the bar in the next room where, among other things, they were serving a Pommery ’29 worth its weight in uranium. I knocked off two glasses before Jane arrived, looking very young and innocent in a plain white dinner dress, her hair drawn severely back ballerina-style. She was like the daughter of a country minister at her first grown-up party, only she looked perhaps too innocent to be the real thing. She caused a mild stir, her appearance at least: this gang hadn’t absorbed her yet, made her a legend the way they had Eglanova who now stood, between Alyosha and Louis in the doorway, like some bird of paradise poised on the edge of a hen coop. In the excitement of Eglanova’s entrance, Jane and I met near the bar and toasted one another in Pommery.

  “How did you like it tonight?” she asked, breathless and young, like a bride in an advertisement (and, like the model in question, well paid for her characterization).

  “Wonderful party,” I said, enjoying myself for the first time, publicly at least, since my wild ballet season began. “Best stuff I’ve ever tasted. And the air-conditioning! Wonderful job … like an autumn day.”

  “You misunderstood,” said Jane firmly, with the bright monomaniacal stare of a dancer discussing the Dance. “I meant my performance.”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t catch it. I was at the office most of the night, before I came here.”

  She rallied bravely. “You … didn’t see me tonight?”

  “No, I had to get some pictures off to the papers … the new ones of you, by the way,” I added.

  “I got eight curtain calls.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  “And three bouquets … from strangers.”

  “Never take candy from strange men, little girl,” I chanted as we moved toward a tall French window which looked out on an eighteenth-century garden, all of five years old.

  “I wish you’d seen it. Tonight was the first night I really danced, that I forgot all about the variations and the audience and that damned cable … that I really let go. Oh, it was wonderful!”

  “You think you’re pretty good, huh?”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that!” She was anxious: nowadays in the theater good form (or actors’ notion of good form) is everything. Everyone dresses carefully and quietly, no practical jokes, no loud voices and, above all, no reference to self … just smile and blush if you are congratulated for having won a Donaldson Award, look blank when someone mentions the spread on you in Life, murmuring something about not having seen it yet. In a way, I prefer the grand old egotists like Eglanova: she hardly admits that there is another ballerina in all the world … and even Louis has been known to ask reviewers: “Who is this Youskevitch you talk to me about?” But anyway Jane had a storm of modesty which quickly passed and then, the Dance taken care of for the rest of the evening, we cruised the party.

  About one o’clock we separated with an agreement to meet
back at her apartment at two-thirty on the dot. Neither of us is very jealous … at least not in theory, and I wandered about the drawing room, saying hello to the few people I knew. I was pretty much lost in this crowd. It’s not the gang I went to school with, the sons of those dull rich families who seldom entertain and who traipse off to Newport, Southampton, Bar Harbor and similar giddy places this time of year; nor is it the professional newspaper and theater world wherein I sing for my supper … rather, it is the world of unfixed money: obscure Europeans, refugees from various unnamed countries, the new-rich, the wilder old-rich, the celebrated figures in the arts who have time for parties and finally the climbers, mysterious and charming and busy, of all ages, sexes, nationalities, shapes and sizes. It takes a long time to straighten everybody out. I haven’t even begun to see my way clear yet but I probably will in a few more years. Some people of course never do add things up right. Lady Edderdale is still among the more confused, after thirty years of high life.

  Beneath a portrait of the lady of the house (the work of Dali) stood Elmer Bush with whom I have a nodding acquaintance … through no fault of mine I am not his bosom buddy: his column, “America’s New York,” is syndicated in seventy-two newspapers as well as being the New York Globe’s biggest draw on the subway circuit. He was of course too important ever to visit the office, so the only time I met him was at first nights when he would always come up to Milton Haddock and say: “It looks like a bomb from where I sit. What do you think, boy?” and Milton would grumble a little and sometimes I would be introduced and sometimes not.

  “Hello there, Mr. Bush,” I said with more authority than usual since I was, after all, sitting in the middle of the best piece of news in town.

  “Why if it isn’t old Pete Sargeant himself,” said Mr. Bush, his face lighting up as he saw his next column practically composed already. He gave a polite but firm chill shoulder to a blond middle-aged star of yesteryear who had obviously got the Gloria Swanson bug; then we were alone together in the middle of the party.

  “Haven’t seen you in a coon’s age!” said Elmer Bush, showing a row of capped teeth: he has the seventh highest Hooper in television with a program called “New York’s America” which is, they tell me, a combination of gossip and interviews with theater people … I never look at television myself because it hurts my eyes. Anyway, Elmer is big league, bald and ulcerous, the perfect symbol of metropolitan success for an earnest hard-working boy like me trying to get ahead in “the game.”