Read Online Dancer From the Dance: A Novel by Andrew Holleran - Free Book Online Page A

in the midst of his most emotional episodes, like a cadaver suddenly sitting up in its coffin, when he suddenly saw he was cold, too. This duality of his cerebral father and tempestuous mother—of northern snows and tropic nights, of the sailors serenading the girls walking down the street in the hot sunlight and Christ dying on the cross within the darkness of the church—was like some gigantic fault that lies dormant in the earth until that single day when years of pressure cause it to slip. His being homosexual was only one aspect of this. He did not think his childhood any different from others he heard of which produced heterosexuals out of the same, if not worse, tensions—and he finally concluded, years later after the most earnest search for the cause of this inconvenience, that a witch had passed a wand over him as he lay sleeping one evening in Ceylon.
    The Bible says, a man divided is unstable in all ways. The child did not know this. The child was dutiful and well brought up, and resolved things by bringing home the first Friday of each month (like the mass devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus) a report card that pleased both mother and father. These different people both wanted him to do well in school. This he did. His geography teacher, the Portuguese gardener, his classmates: Everyone loved him for excelling. "Get a degree in law and finance," his father told him one day, "and you'll always be in demand." At the age of fifteen he was shipped off to America like an island pineapple of special quality to be enrolled in a boarding school in Vermont; and thus, with everything unresolved, confused, inchoate, in a young man who thought life's greatest challenge would be in passing a trigonometry examination, he waved goodbye to the man and woman whose own lives, he would later feel, held the key to his. As their figures grew smaller on the dock in Surabanda between the palms and whitewashed houses, the maid weeping beside them, he moved even farther from a mystery that growing up only obscured, by adding further layers of politeness to a relationship already formal. "Get a degree in law and finance," was all he could think of as his father's white shirt was lost in the specks of color that made up that paradisical island.
    In New England he found snow—but it was the snow of loneliness, for now he missed his family and felt the first shock that occurs when a heart is sundered from its objects of affection. He studied diligently and postponed happiness: a habit he would not abandon for years. Though he was never as great a baseball player as his father had been in his youth, apparently, he was elected captain of the soccer team. He loved the vivid falls—the wildness in the air that singes the soul—and made a few good friends. He was what is so important to Americans: popular. He graduated in a shower of gold. He was ambitious and went to Yale, and from Yale he entered law school, and from law school he enrolled at the University of Stockholm for graduate work in shipping and banking law. He joined a large firm in New York on his return and was immediately assigned a crumb of that enormous banquet that would feed lawyers for decades to come: the Penn Central case. He was considered for a post as White House fellow. He was then a handsome young man in a dark suit with a vest and tie from J. Press in New Haven, wearing glasses to read, and you might have seen him on the shuttle to Washington, reading a novel of Henry James, or on a summer dusk in Georgetown, lingering outside a bookshop to examine the volume on French cathedrals in the window, before going off to the train station to get the Metroliner back to New York. There are various ways to keep the world at arm's length, and success is one of them: Malone was irreproachable, and something of a snob.
    For something had happened to Malone since he'd been sent to America to school. During those snowy New England winters, besides learning to rise at five to