Mystery

Miss Ellinghausen’s Academy of Dance occupied a narrow four-story townhouse on a sidestreet off Calle Berghofstrasse. Only a small, gleaming brass plaque on the front door identified the dancing school. When the cart pulled up before the white stone steps, the Brooks-Lowood students climbed out and spread out along the sidewalk. The driver jingled the reins and drove around the block. While they waited on the sidewalk, the boys buttoned their collars, adjusted their neckties, and gave quick looks at their hands. The girls combed their hair and inspected their faces in hand mirrors. After a minute or two had passed, the door at the top of the stairs swung open, and Miss Ellinghausen, a tiny white-haired woman in a grey dress, pearls, and low-heeled black shoes, stepped out and said, “You may come in, my dears, and line up to be inspected.”

Girls before boys, the students toiled up the steps. Inside the townhouse, they formed a long single line from the front door past the entrance to the parlor all the way to Miss Ellinghausen’s kitchen, which smelled of disinfectant and ammonia. The little woman walked down the row of students, looking closely at their hands and faces. Fritz Redwing was sent upstairs to wash his hands, and all the rest filed into the larger of the two downstairs studios, a large bright room with a polished parquet floor and a bay window filled with an enormous arrangement of silk flowers. Miss Gonsalves, a woman as tiny and ancient as Miss Ellinghausen, but with glossy black hair and elaborate facial makeup, sat poised at an upright piano. Miss Ellinghausen and Miss Gonsalves lived on the upper floors of the Academy, and no one had ever seen either one of them anywhere but in this building.

When Fritz Redwing came back downstairs, grinning foolishly and wiping his hands on the back of his trousers, Miss Ellinghausen said, “We shall begin with a waltz, if you please, Miss Gonsalves. Partners, ladies and gentlemen, partners.”

Since there were more girls than boys, two or three pairs of girls always partnered each other at these lessons. As Buddy Redwing’s acknowledged girlfriend, Sarah Spence generally danced with Moonie Firestone, whose boyfriend was in a military school in Delaware.

On grounds of height rather than compatibility, Tom had long been partnered with a girl named Posy Tuttle, six feet tall exactly. She never spoke to Tom during the classes and avoided even looking him in the eye.

Miss Ellinghausen moved slowly through the laboriously waltzing couples, uttering brief remarks as she went, and gradually worked her way around to Tom and Posy. She stopped beside them, and Posy blushed.

“Try to glide a bit more, Posy,” she said.

Posy bit her lip and tried to glide to the severe meter coming from the upright.

“Are your parents well?”

“Yes, Miss Ellinghausen,” Posy said, blushing all the harder.

“And your mother, Thomas?”

“She’s fine, Miss Ellinghausen.”

“Such a … delicate child she was.”

Tom pushed Posy around in a clumsy circle.

“Thomas, I’d like you to partner Sarah Spence for the rest of the lesson. Posy, I’m sure you will be of more assistance to Marybeth.” This was Moonie’s real name.

Posy dropped Tom’s hand as if it were a hot brick, and Tom followed her across the polished floor to the corner where Sarah Spence and Moonie Firestone were executing bored, perfect waltz steps. “New partners, girls!” exclaimed the old woman, and Tom found himself inches away from Sarah Spence. She was almost instantly in his arms, smiling and looking gravely into his eyes. He heard Posy Tuttle begin rattling away in her flat, ironic voice to Moonie, saying everything she had been saving up.

For an instant Tom and Sarah were awkwardly out of rhythm with one another.

“Sorry,” Tom said.

“Don’t be,” Sarah said. “I’m so used to dancing with Moonie, I forgot what it was like with a boy.”

“You don’t mind?”

“No, I’m glad.”

That silenced Tom for a time.

“I haven’t talked to you in so long,” she said at last.

“I know.”

“Are you nervous?”

“No,” Tom said, though he knew that she could feel him trembling. “Maybe a little.”

“I’m sorry I don’t see you anymore.”

“Are you?” said Tom, surprised.

“Sure. We were friends, and now I only see you in Miss Ellinghausen’s cart.”

The music ceased, and like the other couples Tom and Sarah broke apart and waited for instructions. He had not imagined that Sarah Spence actually paid any attention to him in the dancing school cart.

“Fox trot,” the old woman said. Miss Gonsalves began thumping out “But Not For Me.”

“Are you still doing Fritzie’s homework for him?”

“Somebody has to do it,” Tom said.

She laughed and hugged him in a manner that would have brought a reprimand if Miss Ellinghausen had seen it.

“Moonie and I were so bored with each other. You’d think we were being punished. I thought the only boy I’d ever dance with for the rest of my life was Buddy. And Buddy’s sense of rhythm is a little personal.”

“How is he?”