Fall River and Other Uncollected Stories by John Cheever

Author:John Cheever
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2009-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Princess

SHE WAS JUST an ordinary girl in the line until Golden got hold of her. She was younger than most of them; she must have been about twenty. She had a lot of energy and she was really interested in the work. She had been to a big dancing school in New York for a couple of years and she could do back-bends and high kicks and toe-dancing and in the finale, when the girls came, one by one, down the staircase, she did a high-kick number at the front of the stage, but that was just to make the finale look legal and no one ever looked at her and it was like talking to the backs of a crowd. She wasn’t a princess of course. It wasn’t even her idea. Golden thought it up. He even thought up the name for her. He billed her as the glamorous Princess Nika from South America. Her real name was Dorothy. She wasn’t glamorous and she didn’t know anything about South America except that it was the place where some of those rusty freighters, shored off Brooklyn, came from.

It was in her second year on the stage when the show was rehearsing in New York for the road, that Golden began to push her. She was his girl then and he was probably the first man she had ever known. He did it more out of kindness than anything else. She didn’t have the make-up to be a good teaser or even a dancer. Her face was pretty and stupid. You could nearly count her breast-bones and her breasts were flat. The muscles on her legs were overdeveloped and she walked with a slight spring. She never talked about her family or about the town she came from, but you could tell she came from the west, even if she had picked up a strong New York accent, and it would be one of those tank-towns you see in the evening from the windows of the bus with a light burning in the drugstore. She was ambitious. Her parents had spent nearly all of their money to send her through dancing school and her obligation to them and her memory of them as they would be waiting then, for the news of her success, was one of the reasons why she was so ambitious. She wanted to be famous and successful. She wanted it more than she would ever want any man.

It may have been through understanding this that Golden put her ahead. He took her out of the line and filled the lobby in Brooklyn with her pictures and gave her bigger billings than anyone else. She had four legitimate dances, two before and two after the intermission. She led the chorus and she had the stage to herself for the best part of five minutes. She had worked up the dances herself and drilled the chorus and picked her own scenery out of the warehouse. Of course she wasn’t important to the show.

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