"Duncan,.Lois.-.A.Gift.Of.Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Lois)

"Seminars!" Madame Vilar made a snorting sound. "Seminars cannot take the place of regular classes. Short periods of study do not make a child into a dancer, Mrs. Garrett. The body must be trained for years."
"I have been training it for years," said Kirby. Her light, soft voice broke into the conversation with a note of certainty. "I've done my barre work every day, no matter where we were. I've studied from books. I've watched ballet everywhere there was a performanceЧthe Bolshoi Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, the State Ballet at Frankfurt, the Royal Ballet, Les Ballets des Champs ElysщesЧ"
"Which is worse," Madame broke in, "than if you had never tried to dance at all. You have undoubtedly taught yourself all kinds of wrong habits."
"If I have," Kirby said, "I will unlearn them."
Madame Vilar turned her gaze full upon Kirby for the first time. To the girl she seemed to resemble nothing so much as a black swan. Her neck stretched, long and supple, from between narrow shoulders with a fierce, dark head poised proudly at its top. Her eyes glared, sharp and bright, from beneath arched black wings of brows. She was thin everywhere except for her long, muscular dancer's legs, and although the lines in her face proclaimed her age, her body was as firm and strong as steel wire.
"Very well," she said. "Let us see what you have succeeded in doing to yourself. Pas de bourse, please. Grand jetщ en tournant."
Kirby lifted her arms and moved forward. She went through the steps slowly and carefully and did them again and then again.
"Let's see you do some pirouettes," Madame Vilar told her.
She stood, watching the girl in silence as she twirled across the room.
"Don't you want to see her dance?" Elizabeth asked. "I mean, really dance to music? She can' improvise so beautifully, if we could just put on a recordЧ"
"That will not be necessary," the woman said. She turned her attention from Kirby back to Elizabeth. "You are aware, of course, that she does not have a dancer's build? I should consider it very doubtful that she will ever make a place for herself as a professional dancer."
"I see nothing in the world wrong with her build!" exclaimed Elizabeth. Her normally tranquil face was flushed with sudden anger. "If you don't want Kirby for a pupil, I will certainly take her somewhere else. I hear there is a studio in Bradenton. That isn't so far thatЧ"
"I did not say that I would not accept her," Madame Vilar said sharply. "What days can she come?"
"I can come every day," Kirby told her.
On the way home, her mother's hands were clenched so tightly on the steering wheel that the knuckles showed white.
"What a horrible woman!" she said hi a furious voice. "Imagine, not even letting you dance for her! And criticizing your figure! You don't have to go there, Kirby. There is another studio in Bradenton; that's only a forty-five-minute drive away, andЧ"
"I want to go to this studio," Kirby said firmly. "I like her, Mother. I want to study under Madame Vilar."
That night she stood for a long time in front of the bathroom mirror. The girl who looked back at her was pretty in the same soft way as her mother, although already she was taller. She had nondescript brownish hair with a slight curl, light eyes and brows, round cheeks and a gentle, good-humored mouth.
Kirby stretched herself tall, picturing Madame Vilar's tiny swan's head, proud and fierce on the thin neck.
"She's right," she said as she went back into the bedroom. "Madame says that I'm built all wrong for ballet, and I really am."
"How come?" Brendon asked. He had come down from his room to play solitaire on the floor in the hallway just outside his sisters' door. His whole object, both girls knew, was to force them to step over his game every time they went in or out. Now he glanced up with interest. "Is it because you have too much bottom?"
"Yes," Kirby said seriously. "And my shoulders are too broad. I have too much hips, and I'm going to have too much bosom." She pulled her shirt in close against her body and stared down worriedly at the woman's curves. "I wish I were built like you, Nance."
Nancy was sprawled on her bed reading. She did not lift her gaze.
"I guess it takes a very self-centered person to be a dancer," she said. "A person who's always worrying about how she looks."
"That's not true," Kirby objected. "I'm not always worrying. What's the matter with you anyway, Nancy Garrett? You've gotten so snippy lately I'm about ready to move in with Bren."
"Like fun, you are!" Brendon said, forgetting his card game in joyful anticipation of an argument. "Do you think I want you prancing all over my room, kicking at light switches? Nancy's mad because Mom's going to make her take piano lessons, that's all."
"You're both just unbelievable!" Nancy slammed her book closed and sat erect, wrapping her arms around her knees. "You're unbelievably selfish and unfeeling andЧandЧawful! All you can think about are your games and dancing and things when the most terrible thing in the world has happened right here in our family!"
"You mean Mother and Dad?" Kirby regarded her sister with sympathy. "It is upsetting, Nance, and sad and everything, but when you really think about it, things won't be too awfully different. We'll still see Dad when he's between assignments, and that's about all we ever saw of him anyway. During the last few years he's been zipping around from one dangerous place to another, and we've been stuck on the Riviera or someplace else touristy with Mother. We haven't been a family together for simply ages."
"But they love each other!" Nancy cried. "You know they do! Mother's going to be terribly unhappy living here!"
"Do you think so?"
Kirby let her mind go back to that first morning they had gone into town together. They had stepped off the bus in front of the used car lot, and immediately a little fat man with a gray moustache had come rushing to meet them.
"Liz Burke!" he had cried. "Little Liz Burke! I can't believe it! Are you back for a visit? These can't be your children!"
"Back to stay, Mr. Crandel." Elizabeth's face had brightened with pleasure at being recognized. "I'm Liz Garrett now, and these are my daughters." Brendon had already rushed ahead to inspect the cars which were parked in long lines with their prices marked on their windshields.
The man's glad white smile had covered his whole face.
"Back to live here? How wonderful! And these great girls yours?" He shook his head in astonishment. "It seems like just yesterday when you were the age of this tall one. You came in here with young Tom Duncan when he was buying his first jalopy."
"Tommy Duncan!" Elizabeth's voice was warm with remembering. "I hadn't thought of him in years! I wonder where he is now and what he's doing? I guess no girl ever forgets her first boyfriend."
"He's right here in Palmelo," Mr. Crandel said. "Living right down the beach from your mother's house, in fact. He's the guidance counselor at the new junior high school. I guess there's something about this old home town that draws people back again."
"Well, it's home," Elizabeth said. "And now I need a car. Do you think you can help me find a good one? I know so little about engines and things."
"Certainly, certainly, we'll find you the perfect car!"
Mr. Crandel walked with them between the rows of automobiles, and all the while, between comments on gearshifts and tires and power steering, the two of them kept talking about people and events of which Kirby had never heard before. For as long as she could remember in her parents' life together, it had been her father who had dominated every conversation; wherever they had gone it had been his dynamic personality and great booming laugh that had filled the world, with her mother soft and smiling in the background. Now here was this little man with the gray hair who did not even mention Richard Garrett. He made it seem as though Elizabeth were a kind of princess come back to visit a kingdom that she had left too quickly.
They completed the morning by buying a four-year-old Ford Fairlane.
"Our first car," Brendon grumbled disgustedly, "and it's just an old secondhand nothing. You might at least have got us that Oldsmobile Toronado with the front-wheel drive!"
But Kirby, glancing across at her mother in the driver's seat, had felt nothing but pleasure in the car and in its driver. Elizabeth might not have driven for a long time, but there was no uncertainty about her as she shifted gears and pressed the accelerator to bring the engine to life. There was a proud little smile on her face as she turned off the main street of town onto the shore road which led to their house on the beach.
"I knew I could still do it," she said softly.
Now, in the face of Nancy's misery, Kirby tried to think of some way she could bring back her feelings of that moment and make her sister understand them. It was as though a special part of her mother had lain sleeping for years and years in the shadow of someone else and was now slowly coming awake.
"Maybe Mother needs to be herself," Kirby said slowly, "more than she needs to be Mrs. Richard Garrett. Being in love isn't everything, Nance. I couldn't give up my dancing, for instance, ever, for anybody. It would be like giving up the part of myself that makes me me."
"That's the stupidest thing I ever heard," Nancy said flatly. "Mother isn't a dancer. Without Dad she won't have anything, and I'm glad she won't. Maybe she'll miss him so much that she'll pile us all on a plane and take us back to him again."
"I hope we stay here until I can find the treasure." Brendon gathered his cards into a pile. "How about some rummy, Kirby?"
"I have to work on my rond de jambe," Kirby said. "Get Nancy to play."
"That's no fun. She always knows the cards." Brendon made a face at both sisters and then paused, catching sight of Nancy's expression. "What is it? You seeing something?"