The short history of a p.., p.1
The Short History of a Prince, page 1
Praise for
THE SHORT HISTORY OF A PRINCE
“Few novelists portray real life and high art convincingly on the same page. The surprise here is that Hamilton, a gifted chronicler of the everyday, deftly combines the two … The Short History of a Prince is the most contemplative and languorous of her novels. It may also be her finest.”
—New York Daily News
“There are no shocking dramas or earth-shattering revelations here. Perhaps that’s why this lovely, witty book rings so true.”
—Mademoiselle
“Jane Hamilton continues to use her considerable talent in the service of compassion … totally absorbing.”
—Dallas Morning News
“[Hamilton] can make real life riveting … There can be no better recommendation for a novelist.”
—Denver Post
“Magically captures the anxious vulnerability of adolescence … Jane Hamilton has crafted a lyrical family drama, and writes in beautiful, languid, descriptive sentences. Her vividly drawn characters seem familiar and real, like so many Polaroid snapshots.”
—Redbook
“A wise and richly textured look at art and talent, family, friendship, and sexuality … Hamilton writes with a compassion that is not only missing from so many other books, it is missing from the world, and therein lies much of the novel’s beauty and importance.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Engrossing, beautifully written … a story of not only being at a place where one can love and be loved, but of getting to that place.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A novel that seeks to understand what it means to live a thoughtfully examined life. With hardly a false note or a word out of place, Hamilton has created one of the most believable and appealing characters in contemporary American fiction.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Hamilton creates stories that are almost impossible to set aside. She has created living, breathing characters whom she knows inside and out—so we do, too.”
—Seattle Times
“Hamilton brings to her third novel the same qualities of emotional integrity and compassionate understanding that distinguished The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World … rewards readers with a fully dimensional picture of evolving lives.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
“A meditative, slow-moving, and thoroughly absorbing family drama about loving, losing, and holding on to all we can. This is a lyrical, bighearted novel that won’t easily be forgotten.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Readers love Hamilton not only for the beauty of her prose and the profundity of her story lines but also for her psychological precision and authorial benevolence … [the] plot [is] involving and resonant, but it is Hamilton’s extraordinary insights into human nature that make this novel shine as she transforms ordinary occurrences—a conversation, a prank, a moment of intimacy—into nothing less than intimations of the divine.”
—Booklist (starred)
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
Chapter One - August 1972
Chapter Two - September 1995
Chapter Three - October 1972
Chapter Four - November 1995
Chapter Five - December 1972
Chapter Six - January 1996
Chapter Seven - February 1973
Chapter Eight - March 1996
Chapter Nine - April 1973
Chapter Ten - May 1996
Chapter Eleven - June 1973
Chapter Twelve - July 1996
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Books by Jane Hamilton
Copyright
For JMW—for Boonkie
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Short History of a Prince is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all names and characters, with the exception of a few well-known ballet dancers, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual people is unintentional. Where the real-life figures appear, the situations, incidents and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely imaginary and are not intended to depict any actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work.
One
AUGUST
1972
Why Walter woke up earlier than usual on August 10, Saturday, he couldn’t at first explain. The collies next door were barking at the air, as always, no space for brains in the tiny knob between their pedigreed ears. It had rained in the night and the summer sun was already drawing steam from the moist ground. Walter would later say that he felt her, that it wasn’t the light cutting through the misty heat or the rumpus of the Gamble dogs that made him sit up. He had gone to the window and looked out. It was like the dawn of the world down below, so green and vapory and lush with fronds, and when the lilac tree shook in her yard he admitted that his foolish heart came up his throat. He was still half asleep, and for an instant—just that long—he expected to see a reptile reeling in breakfast on its sticky tongue or a dragonfly, all veiny wings, the size of a model airplane. Thank God! It was instead Mrs. Gamble snapping at the dying wood of the tree with her red-handled loppers.
Woman, what have I to do with you? Walter thought, words he’d heard somewhere, in a play or from a book. It was five-thirty in the morning, the day of his Aunt Jeannie’s and, also somewhat incidentally, his Uncle Ted’s anniversary party. He needed his sleep, in preparation for the event. That he was awake and watching Mrs. Gamble must mean something. He was often assigning meaning to moments, saying, Here, and here, and here is a beginning, the opening sequence of my real life. He was fifteen and he was ready for drama even if he had to construct it himself. Ideally he’d take the part of the unlikely hero, or the witty and cunning rescuer, or the artist who is at first misunderstood. And in the conflict, he guessed, he might enjoy being hurt just enough to make an appealing victim, but not so much that he’d actually suffer. How convenient it would be, too, if change was heralded, if an epoch was launched with a clarion call or unusual weather patterns, if Mrs. Gamble could get her dogs to tweet, the birds to bark when there was going to be upheaval.
He remembered how Mrs. Gamble used to sit on her toilet in the downstairs bathroom in the old days when he was over playing with Trishie Gamble, how she smoked her cigarettes and read from her book of astrological charts. The book lay open on her lap, on her apron, her pants in folds around her ankles. Her short dingy hair, as usual, was coiled into pin curls and secured with bobby pins. She had apparently long since given up the habit of shutting the bathroom door in her own house, so what if Trishie and her son, Greg, the neighbors, the dogs, drifted by while she cast their horoscopes. Walter was Virgo, the virgin: “Exact,” she told him, “methodical. Industrious. Chaste.” She said the word with relish. “Ch-haste.” He didn’t know what it meant, precisely, and he couldn’t tell if it was something he could look forward to being. “ ‘The Virgoan heart,’ ” she recited, “ ‘is not quickly melted, but when once it finds itself in love’s furnace it glows with a pure white heat and takes ages to cool.’ ”
He conceded, to himself, that he was still afraid of her, a little, it was true, afraid to look her right in the eye. Down in the yard she was wrestling with the lilac branch, having trouble making her cut. It was one of the first signals, he would tell his friend Susan months later. Mrs. Gamble, the augur, with her loppers, trying to clip away the canker. When she squinted up at his bedroom that Saturday morning he ducked. He went down on all fours and crawled to his bed. She had felt his gaze—he shivered at the thought of it. He should shut his eyes and dream about a carefree Walter McCloud, a slouch, the life of the party, a boy with a new star, a new planet, a new astrological house. The Gamble collies had already barked at the neighbor, Mr. Kloper, on his way to work, and so there was no real reason he couldn’t turn over and go back to sleep.
Two hours later when Walter went down to the kitchen he found his mother standing by the sink with her nose under his brother’s chin, inspecting his Adam’s apple. Joyce was wearing her purple-and-blue apron that went up over her shoulders and crossed in the back with an additional sash around the waist, tied in a bow. Walter had been to the ballet the night before with his aunt, and it struck him that his mother was wearing something like a costume. He wondered if a choreographer as sensitive and penetrating as Mr. George Balanchine could translate Joyce’s life into dance. What would the genius ballet master do, he wondered, to get at the essence of Joyce? He sat down to his cornflakes trying to imagine what trick Mr. B. used to bring the spirit of his dancers to the fore. In a feeble beginning, he knew, he pictured Joyce rising up and skimming across the floor on the tips of her toes doing bourrées, to pour him orange juice and set out the napkins.
“Does it hurt when I touch there?” Joyce was saying, pushing the pad of her thumb into what she thought was her older son’s lymph node.
“Sort of.” Daniel had thrown his head back, to the limit, and the strain made his voice sound higher than usual.
“She means, is it pressure, which is not necessarily a bad thing, or is it pain?” Walter said, turning the cereal box over to read the ingredients. He’d pulled a muscle in ballet class in July and his teacher had spoken to him in a similar vein, trying to pinpoint the hurt.
“That’s right,” Joyce sa id, “pressure or pain?”
“I don’t know, Mom. I just feel it. It’s big.”
Walter glanced up from the box. “You two may be under the impression that you are alone, in our own house, but in fact you’re providing Mrs. Gamble with an excellent view of the examination from her kitchen window. She probably has already figured out what’s on Dan’s neck. I bet she’s on her way over here now with a cure-all, with some organic liver.”
Daniel did not mutter a brotherly “Shut up,” or try to move away from the sink. His head was still hanging back and he gurgled when he spoke. “Organic liver?”
“I’m going to talk to the doctor, Daniel,” Joyce said.
“Aw, Mom, it’s all right. I don’t want to mess up the day.”
“Overnight you have a—protrusion—as big as a—”
Walter stood up, to see. He had not ever been athletically inclined but he understood his mother’s confusion. There was no ball in any American game that he knew of for purposes of comparisons. “How’d you get that?” he asked, gaping.
“I have a sore throat,” Daniel said, as if that explained the vaguely three-sided growth that was slightly smaller than a tennis ball. “I woke up with it.”
Over the phone the doctor prescribed aspirin and bed rest and further consultation in a day or two if the pustule hadn’t drained on its own. Joyce hung up the telephone and opened the refrigerator to look at the two hundred deviled eggs she’d made the day before. The McCloud family was supposed to drive up to Wisconsin, to Lake Margaret, for Aunt Jeannie’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Joyce did not want to leave her son at home with such an odd malady. “Are you well enough, Daniel, to ride in the car,” she said, “or are you sick enough for me, at least, to stay with you?”
Walter set his spoon down on the table and turned around to look at her. They had to go. Aunt Jeannie had asked for his help, and Joyce had made the lime Jell-O in the doughnut molds, the orange Jell-O in the fish molds, the deviled eggs, a ham and a kettle of baked beans. He realized that he’d been looking forward to the day. He didn’t want to miss the occasion, and he also didn’t like the idea of being at the lake, at the extravaganza, without his mother. It was she, it was her presence, that kept a family party from going off center.
There were no ballet classes in August, and Walter and his two dancing-school friends, Susan and Mitch, had been hired by Aunt Jeannie to serve the hors d’oeuvres and refill the champagne glasses. They had been instructed to wear black dress pants and white shirts and black bow ties. Aunt Jeannie had purchased silver plastic bowler hats for the servers and commanded her daughter Francie to sew silver-sequined vests. Walter had told his friends that Aunt Jeannie was a nut case, there wasn’t any straighter arrow than her husband, and so there was bound to be some excitement. They’d load the car with grocery bag after grocery bag, sacks filled with buns, cantaloupes, cherries, peaches, whole watermelons, gallons of milk. On the way Walter planned to be in the fold-out seat in the back of the station wagon, squashed against Mitch, across from Susan, all of their legs tangled together, the wind blowing through the car so that none of the other McClouds, neither his parents, nor Daniel, if he made it, could hear the conversation.
Walter had been taken from his Illinois home to Wisconsin, to Lake Margaret, through the summers ever since he was born. His great-grandfather had built the Victorian house, the barn, the pump house, the privy and the summer kitchen. The estate had passed to Joyce’s father and after his death to Joyce and her two sisters and two brothers. Weekend after weekend Joyce’s husband, Robert, stopped at the iron gate and Joyce and her two boys got out and walked up the wooded drive. That was the important part, to walk the last stretch, to see it all come slowly through the trees: first, in the far distance, the glint of the lake, and then the red and blue of the plaid hammock strung between the oaks, and the stone shepherd boy in the middle of the fountain, the grassy opening, the croquet hoops and colored balls, and finally the house itself, the lovely old white clapboard house, with scallops and latticework, the long windows, the lacy curtains, the swing on the front porch moving in the breeze.
Walter loved that walk, the feeling that you couldn’t get to Lake Margaret by car, not really. The place still had the lingering odor of carriage leather, starched sheets and kerosene lamps, and sometimes he imagined that the relatives, all of them who had come before, were still sleeping in their iron beds upstairs under the eaves. They were sleeping, the whiteness of the hot afternoon under their closed lids, the sounds in their ears of the water and the insects, the halyard idly banging against the mast in the soft hot wind. He knew the ancestors because there were photographs on a Peg-Board in the living room, pictures of the jowly great-grandmother and the great-grandfather awkwardly holding a baby. There were pictures of the great-aunts, the solemn young women with their hair piled on top of their heads, and the great-uncles with handlebar mustaches and what looked like barbershop-quartet clothes. It was so strange, Walter thought, that a house could outlive a person; strange, marvelous even, that he could walk up the drive and out of time.
Walter hated the idea of staying home from the lake, missing the anniversary party, and only because Daniel had a goiter and a sore throat. It was Daniel who, point by point, convinced Joyce that they should go and leave him behind. He would be fine in a day or two, he assured her, and, in case she’d forgotten, he was no longer five but seventeen years old, capable of pouring his own ginger ale and putting himself to bed. Actually, he said, he’d welcome the chance to rest up, to get ready for two important swim team races in the coming week.
The McClouds’ house and the Gambles’ house were the only two homes on Maplewood Avenue that were mirror images of each other, so that kitchen faced kitchen, dining room faced dining room. To set the day to rights Joyce, from the kitchen window, flagged down Mrs. Gamble at her sink. In a matter of seconds both women were out in their yards, standing at the Gambles’ chain-link fence. Daniel’s little dog, Duke, a terrier and beagle mix, did not seem to realize that it was futile to try to mount the Gamble collies through the diamond links, and Joyce absently reached for his choke collar, pulling him to her so that he was standing on his hind legs, his eyes bulging.
“How’s the carport construction coming, Florence?” Joyce asked.
Mrs. Gamble reached over the fence toward Duke. “Give the boy to me.” She hoisted him up, and when she had him, clasped to her bosom, she lifted up the flap of his black ear and whispered down into the inner chamber. He stopped scrabbling and went still.
Joyce remembered then that at breakfast Walter had said something about Mrs. Gamble. What was it? A line about Mrs. Gamble giving an examination, Mrs. Gamble knowing more than they did. She couldn’t get it back exactly. But it was true, she thought, that Florence was like the headmistress of the block, the dread matron patrolling the corridors. She should have had a career, Joyce supposed, a position that made use of her unusual talents. A postal official barking at the next customer to step up to the window, or a meter maid marking time with her long chalk on the stick. When the children pestered the milkman for ice on humid mornings, out Mrs. Gamble charged from her back door, snapping her bullwhip on the pavement. The urchin pack scattered, gone, not a sound but the burr of the Borden’s motor and the echo of the whip. Why she owned such a thing was a mystery, although some said it had come down to her from her cowhand uncle. Why she felt the need to police the children and the milkman was another puzzle. Joyce had found Walter trembling in the bushes once, the ice melting in his clenched fist, water running down his arm. There was probably not enough in Florence’s three-story house, Joyce thought, and the quarter-acre lot, to keep a woman with her intellect occupied, and so she had moved beyond her property line, out into the alley, to keep watch and edify. There was no doubt that she was the pioneer with improvements on Maplewood Avenue: there had been the state-of-the-art chain-link fence, and then the rubber straps with hooks that went over the top of the trash cans to prevent retarded Billy Wexler from swiping the lids. Most recently, there was to be the addition of the carport.
