Villa America by Liza Klaussmann Read Free Book Online Page A

and started, like the rev of a motorcar engine. The woodwinds played so high and so sharp that Sara winced and the duchess dramatically placed a gloved hand over her right ear.
    Then the curtain went up. A group of dancers clad in furs and small pointy hats, all pagan and hideous, began stamping up and down on the stage in time to the horns and strings.
    “Oh my,” Diana whispered.
    An old cronelike figure, her face painted entirely white, like a death mask, stood in the foreground, bent at the waist, clutching her stomach. Then she too began jumping up and down and throwing herself around, falling on her back with her legs sticking up in the air.
    Sara straightened her spine.
    This was not ballet. Gone were the delicate, airy costumes, the movements fluid as water, toes pointed to follow the muscular line of a dancer’s calf. Here, feet stuck out at right angles, dancers rounded their backs when they dipped to the floor, ordinary and inelegant as anyone picking up a scrap of paper, their arms angular as they pumped angry raised fists.
    She understood what had made the Parisian audience so angry. To have one’s own love of comfort and beauty thrown back in one’s face in such a public way. It made the audience feel small, shallow.
    But there was something else Sara recognized here that they must have seen too: a kind of rage. Sara’s pulse flicked at her temple like a horse crop, and her palms began to sweat.
    Drums accompanied the pounding of feet, sending up vibrations so violent they scaled the orchestra and made the floorboards tremble. More primitive costumes filled the stage as the dancers began to clap.
    “Are they actually clapping?” the duchess mused from her seat to no one in particular.
    Sara heard her mother say something, but it was drowned out by the noise and the humming in her own head. When an elder was brought onto the stage, the whole group threw themselves down again and again. She could hear their bodies hitting the floor, flesh and blood connecting with the dusty boards, the crush of joints and ligaments.
    She wanted to be down on the stage with the dancers, feel her rib cage meet the planks, feel the sickly ache of having her breath knocked out. She was reminded of the first time she’d tasted blood in her mouth (a skating accident), the surprise that it tasted good, rich, tangy on her tongue, the even more startling revelation that she wanted to taste it again.
    The maiden chosen for sacrifice now stood alone in a pool of light on the stage, motionless and knock-kneed, as the score dropped to a hush. Sara held her breath until it was almost unbearable.
    She was dizzy by the time the girl began to dance, a death spiral, full of helplessness, compulsion. Running from pillar to post in a desire to escape her fate, to be let out of the circle. Jumping and turning herself in a frenzy.
     Sara could almost smell the soil, hardened, awaiting spring. She was vibrating with the lack of oxygen, the warmth of the theater, and the strangeness of the music. Then the maiden, exhausted, shivered and stamped. And fell down dead.
    Sara realized the lights had gone up only when her mother pressed her hand, a look of alarm in her eyes.
    “Are you quite well?” she whispered.
    Sara could only shake her head.
      
    “Oh, dear,” the duchess said as they made their way to the street. “It looks like the nice evening at the theater is going out of style. I suppose we must all adjust.”
    “I thought it was horrifying,” Adeline said, mauve evening bag firmly in hand. “Sara practically took ill.”
    “I don’t see what all the fuss is about,” Hoytie said. “What was that, anyway? Just a bunch of unappealing people in unflattering dress hurling themselves around, as far as I could tell.”
    “That,” Sara said, her breath only now beginning to come easily, “that was new.” At that moment, she felt like she might never sleep again.
      
    Gerald was lying on the beach in East Hampton at five