Previous
Chapter 1
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Wise Children, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Sex, Procreation, and Parenthood
Twins, Doubles, and Confused Identities
Matriarchy and Found Family
Show Business, Aging, and Memory
Comedy vs. Tragedy
Summary
Analysis
Starting when Dora and Nora were six years old, Grandma Chance would bring them to dance lessons on Saturday mornings. The lessons were taught by an old woman, Mrs. Worthington, and her daughter Miss Worthington, nearly 60 but always in a bright pink tutu. These lessons were the highlight of the week.
Rather than dwelling in the pain of Tiffany’s disappearance, Dora looks backwards to a happier time: her and Nora’s first real introduction to dance. That the twins learned to dance from a mother-daughter duo fits with the novel’s matriarchal theme. And decades later, Dora and Nora will continue the Worthington legacy when they open their own dance school out of 49 Bard Road.
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For their seventh birthday, Grandma took the twins to Lady Be Good, a musical comedy starring Fred and Adéle Astaire. Dora and Nora sat there, squirming with excitement as the curtain raised. For Dora, the anticipation was the best part. But the show was wonderful, too, and for weeks to come, Dora and Nora would reenact it in their living room, memorizing and performing all the dance steps.
Given the novel’s scrambled chronology, readers know that eventually, Dora and Nora will get to work with Fred and Adéle, these dancers they so idolized as children. Yet even in this most joyful memory, Dora cannot help acknowledging the possibility of disappointment, noting that the anticipation of something is usually better than the real thing.
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During intermission, Grandma ordered tea, with cucumber sandwiches and dainty silverware. Dora and Nora were just about to dive into the treats when Grandma noticed a man in the theater, his arm around a beautiful woman. Grandma, her voice quivering, announced that the man across the room was the girls’ father. Dora and Nora had never cared much about their paternity before—but this man (Melchior) was so glamorous, and Grandma’s voice so dramatic, that this time, the twins wanted to know more.
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On the cab ride home, Nora, newly curious, asked Grandma to tell them more about fathers. Grandma was not shy when it came to sex education. Dora, only seven, remembers being baffled by Grandma’s graphic explanations. And more baffling still was the idea that Dora and Nora existed only because “a man we’d never met did that to a girl we didn’t remember, once upon a time!” After that day, however, both Dora and Nora became more curious about their father, collecting pictures of him to hide in their underwear drawers. It was as if they each “had a crush” on Melchior, though they kept these intense feelings from each other.
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Dora remembers her seventh birthday as the first time she ever saw her father, and as the first time she ever saw a play. But it was also the day that the girls received Perry’s best gift yet: a toy theater, with curtains and backdrops. The girls played with it every Sunday as children, and Dora treasured it for years, until they had to sell it to pay for Tiffany’s diapers when Brenda was a young mother.
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That was the birthday that Dora and Nora decided they wanted to become performers, though they had to yet to realize that their more famous Hazard relatives would always upstage them (“tragedy,” Dora sighs, “eternally more class than comedy”). In recent years, the twins’ dancing careers have been difficult. The main work they can find is as scantily clad dancers in seedy burlesque shows. But there was a time, Dora assures her readers, when the Chance sisters were well-respected throughout London’s theatrical scene.
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After that eventful seventh birthday, Dora and Nora begged Grandma to take more lessons with Miss Worthington, and Grandma obliged. A few years later, the dance teacher told Grandma that a local production was looking to cast children and suggested that Dora and Nora audition. The twins were cast in the show, and they were even given a special number where they dressed up as birds. Dora reflects that neither she nor Nora were particularly special on their own, “but put us together,” Dora boasts, and “people blinked.” Back then, there was no way of telling the twins apart. They even used to use the same perfume.
Dora still remembers that first night she and Nora shared onstage, crammed into the dressing room with all the other children. Nora’s beak costume broke and Dora’s stockings tore, but it didn’t matter. They had found their calling. The twins were determined to go on dancing forever, though Grandma just saved their meager paychecks in a bank and repeated her motto: “hope for the best, expect the worst.”
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Now, Dora’s memory jumps ahead: she and Nora have just turned 13, and Perry, recently returned to London, surprises them (along with Grandma and Our Cyn) with a trip to the beach. Perry brings a delicious picnic, and after they finish eating, he makes all the dishware disappear, one of his classic conjuring tricks. Perry even lets both girls have a glass of champagne. Looking back on that morning, Dora remembers it as one of the happiest of her life.
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After lunch, Perry sneaks Dora and Nora into a matinee comedy show. The comedian is named Gorgeous George, and he tells a series of dirty jokes: a boy keeps falling in love with different women, only to realize they are all his half-sisters, products of his father’s affairs. The punchline is that the boy complains to his mother, and she reveals that his father isn’t his father at all (“’e’s not your father”). In fact, the boy is the product of her affair with another man.
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The audience guffaws, delighted. Then, as a grand finale, George strips down to his G-string underwear, revealing a map of the world tattooed onto his body. George flexes his muscles, twirls a golf club in the air, and the set is over. On the way out of the theater, Dora thinks again of Grandma’s warning, that wars only existed for old men to get young ones out of the way so they could have all the women to themselves. George’s joke seems to affirm this worldview.
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After the show, Perry and the girls walk down the boardwalk until they stumble along an advertisement: Melchior is doing Macbeth in a nearby theater. Nora and Dora both insist that they should get back to Grandma, but the tears in their eyes reveal how badly they want to meet their father. Moved, Perry decides to sneak the girls into to Melchior’s dressing room.
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The applause sounds, signaling that the play has finished, and in an instant, Melchior is in the dressing room. Dora is struck by how handsome and tall he is, and she almost pees with excitement. But though Dora notes that Melchior’s eyes seem warm, those eyes skip over her and Nora entirely, landing only on Perry. When Melchior does see the twins, he only remarks to Perry that “you’ve brought your lovely daughters, too!”
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In Dora’s memory, when Melchior “denied” that she and Nora were his children, Perry swept the twins up into his arms and did a backflip out the window. The reality, Dora has to admit, was probably simpler: Perry brought Dora and Nora downstairs as fast he could, taking the two girls to Grandma and then back to London. On the drive home, Our Cyn revealed that she had fallen in love with the cabby who had driven them to the beach, and they had decided to get married.
Dora jumps forward, to the day that Our Cyn gave birth to the first of her five children with the cabby. Coincidentally, it was the same day Saskia and Imogen were born—and the same day that Nora and Dora both got their first menstrual periods. Even now, it stings Dora that not only is Saskia richer and more “legitimate,” but she is younger, too. Dora also remembers that Perry seemed strangely sad in those weeks after Saskia and Imogen were born, though she does not know why.
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Meanwhile, Dora and Nora were still touring all over the British Empire, making ends meet as dancers. And just in time, because Perry—who had been bankrolling the family—had suddenly lost all his money in the Wall Street crash. Destitute, Perry decided to head to Los Angeles, where he planned to go into the movies.
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Dora recalls the early years of her and Nora’s career, when they were just two girls “pounding the boards.” They used to perform all over London, often in theaters that no longer exist. They worked for almost no money, so poor they can’t even afford new stockings when the old ones ripped. And even though their identical twinness was a selling point, the girls knew that they were “expendable,” so they would perform even when they had the flu or a fever.
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One day, by chance, Wheelchair—whose real name is Lady Atalanta Lynde, or the Lady A.—is in the audience at Dora and Nora’s show. Lady A.’s own daughters hate the show: Saskia starts howling, and Imogen falls asleep. But afterwards, recognizing the twins as her husband’s illegitimate daughters, Lady A. sends flowers and even invites Dora and Nora to tea. Dora reflects that Lady A. must really have loved Melchior, even if she had “slipped up the once.”
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As Dora and Nora become more seasoned performers, they start to eat meat and wear fur, the first fissures in their relationship with their animal-loving Grandma. Even so, Grandma continues to dote on the twins, carefully documenting all their performances in her scrapbook. Or at least all the performances until 1944, at which point Grandma stepped out to get a drink during an air raid and was killed by a bomb.
Dora shakes that memory from her head, returning to the story of her early career. At 15, Dora and Nora dye their hair black (Dora doesn’t want to be a redhead, because that is too much like Saskia). Now, Dora and Nora are amazed to look into the mirror and see new, more grown-up faces looking back at them. From that day on, the duo calls themselves the “Lucky Chances.”
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Nora was always more sexually promiscuous than Dora. When the girls are 16, dancing in a production of Mother Goose, Nora loses her virginity to the actor (decades older and married) who plays the Goose. They have sex in a back alley while Nora pretends to be Dora to distract the Goose’s wife. A few weeks later, Nora realizes she had gotten pregnant when she miscarries, bleeding onstage in the middle of one of the girls’ dance numbers.
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Nora cries for a month about the loss of the baby, but then she is on to the next love affair, and the next. While Dora is cautious, managing the twins’ finances and urging Nora to use birth control, Nora allows herself to be swept away by each new tryst. Eventually, Nora starts seeing a young, blond tenor in one of their show’s choruses. The duo has sex in the dressing rooms, so loud Dora hears it through the walls.
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Unfortunately, as the twins’ 17th birthday approaches, Dora realize she is in love with the blond tenor, drawn to his youthful innocence. As a birthday present, Dora asks if she can impersonate Nora and have sex with the tenor. Nora reluctantly agrees, and for one night, the sisters switch perfumes: Dora puts on Nora’s signature Shalimar, while Nora dons Dora’s Mitsouko.
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At the end of the night, as planned, Dora slips off with the tenor. The room is heavy with the scent of lilacs. As the tenor undresses, Dora is struck by his lack of body hair. Dora reflects that she has seen Nora cry over love affairs (and almost bleed to death for them), but as they have sex, Dora finally experiences this passion for herself. The room smells like Shalimar and sex: “the smells of him and me,” Dora reflects, “that were the really the smells of him and Nora.”
The tenor eventually leaves, and Dora heads back downstairs to her birthday party. The lilacs are already starting to rot, though Dora tries to ignore the symbolism of this. Nora is long gone by now, having slipped off with the show’s piano player—although, since the sisters have traded places tonight, the piano man thinks he is having sex with Dora. But to Dora’s shock, Melchior has just arrived at the party. Dora knows that her father’s sudden appearance is because Lady A. nudged him to visit (one of the reasons Dora and Nora remain so loyal to the Lady A./Wheelchair in her old age). But still, Dora’s heart skips a beat when she sees Melchior here.
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Melchior takes Dora’s hand and they start to dance, a gesture that makes Dora burst out crying. Then, Melchior informs Dora that he has a very special birthday present for the twins: he wants them to dance in his new Shakespeare-themed revue What You Will, soon to be made famous on the West End. Before Melchior leaves, he kisses Dora’s head, and she swears that she will never wash her hair again.
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Dora departs, elated and terrified: she has had sex for the first time and been kissed by her father for the first time, all in one night. When Dora gets home, it only takes Grandma a second to see the change in Dora. “Whoever he is,” Grandma warns, “he’s not worth it.” Then, Dora realizes that Perry is asleep on the couch—her uncle has come home again at last.
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Now, Dora jumps forward to the opening night of What? You Will? on the West End. Dora, unable to reveal that she and her sister switched places for a night, is trapped into dating the piano man with whom Nora had sex during their birthday party, though she finds him vaguely repulsive. The piano man has written all the music for What! You Will?, and Melchior is starring in it. And Peregrine, back from the U.S., has written the entire thing, the first time the brothers have teamed up professionally.
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By this point, Nora and Dora are 18 years old and seasoned chorus girls. They dance in almost every scene in the show, wearing real silk and satin. Dora even gets to sing a solo. Melchior plays Shakespeare, while the Lady A., Saskia and Imogen all have bit parts. Melchior has still never apologized for the way he treated Dora and Nora, though Melchior believes that giving his illegitimate daughters their “big chance” is about as good as asking for their forgiveness.
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And indeed, this revue inducts the twins into a life of luxury. The twins dine on caviar and hang out at fancy nightclubs. Once, Dora and Nora even dance with the Princes of Wales. Adoring male fans send Dora and Nora stockings and fruit baskets and bouquets. Uncle Perry, too, is rich again, and he and Grandma spend hours drinking together. Nora’s tenor leaves London, but she moves on quickly. Dora keeps reluctantly seeing her piano man, and Grandma makes sure the twins always carry their “dutch caps” (diaphragms).
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Around this time, Grandma starts wearing more clothes around the house. Once, when Dora catches sight of herself and Grandma in the mirror, she bursts out laughing at how saggy and wrinkled Grandma looks. Dora immediately feels guilty, especially when Grandma reminds her that eventually, Dora and Nora will grow old, too. After that, Grandma is cold to Dora for months. Later, when Dora looks back on scrapbooks from this time, she is shocked to see how tacky she and Nora look: like “street urchins decked up like Christmas trees,” appealing not because they are elegant but because they are scrappy and innocent.
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And all the while, Melchior is thriving. Lady A. has inherited a family estate known as Lynde Court, and Melchior spends a lot of money to renovate it, though it looks a little ridiculous, like the set of a play. For a long time, Dora and Nora never score an invite to this mansion, much to their mutual chagrin. But eventually, Melchior asks them to attend a party there. The piano man points out that all of Hollywood will be at this party. This is, in other words, a giant audition.
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The day of the party arrives, and the girls drive to Lynde Court. There is snow everywhere, blanketing the house’s turrets and fountains. The sight takes Dora’s breath away—though now, she says ruefully, the whole image has been “relocated to Memory Lane,” locked away. When the twins get out of the car a group of lute-players greet them. Melchior and the Lady A. are dressed in Shakespearean costumes.
Once inside, Dora realizes that one of the party’s waiters is the blond tenor from years ago. Immediately, Dora and the tenor reconnect, kissing then sneaking upstairs to the master bedroom, where Melchior sleeps. As Dora crawls onto the bed, she sees Ranulph’s cardboard crown tucked away in a glass cabinet.
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Before she has sex with the tenor, Dora takes off her makeup and confesses to dyeing her hair. Tonight, she is desperate to look like herself, even if she does not know exactly what that means. As the tenor undresses, Dora reflects that both her mother Kitty and her grandmother Estella died for love. For the first time, Dora understands how that is possible. After they have sex, the tenor sighs “Nora, you’ve changed your perfume.” Dora is about to confess her real identity—but before she can do so, she smells something burning.
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Suddenly, someone shouts “FIRE!” Dora and the blond tenor try to flee down the stairs, but the fire has already climbed the steps. In a panic, they climb out the window, both completely naked. Again, the tenor calls Dora “Nora,” and again, Dora considers telling him the truth. The tenor has an erection, however, and rather than revealing her true self to her lover, Dora decides to have sex with him in the bushes. As the flames burn Lynde Court to the ground, Dora notes that many other party guests are doing the same thing.
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When Dora and the tenor are finished, Dora sits up with a start—she does not see Nora anywhere, and she is worried her sister has died in the fire. Dora is firm that not for one second does she see Nora’s death as a chance to be with the tenor forever. “To tell the truth,” Dora realizes of her twin, “I love her best and always have.” Still naked, Dora searches the grounds for Nora, but she does not see her sister or Uncle Perry anywhere. Dora panics, thinking that her life is not worth living without Nora at her side.
Then, suddenly, Dora bumps into Melchior himself. To her surprise, Melchior does not seem terribly upset about the fire. Instead, he offers Dora (“or is it Nora?”) a glass of champagne, and they toast. Through tears, Dora worries that she has lost her sister. Melchior seems unmoved by this. But when he realizes that his cardboard crown might have been burned, he breaks down into sobs. The crown, Melchior confesses, means more to him than wealth, fame, women, or children.
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Fortunately, at that very moment, Perry appears from the fire, carrying Nora in his arms and wearing Melchior’s cardboard crown on his head. The flames distort Perry in Dora’s vision, making the already broad-shouldered man look impossibly giant. Hazily, Nora asks where Dora is. Melchior, who seems completely unconcerned with Nora’s safety, only has eyes for the crown. But Perry can’t resist taunting him with the costume piece, insisting that if Melchior wants it, he will have to “jump for it” like a little boy.
Later, Dora will learn how the fire started: the party’s guest of honor, a Hollywood producer, dropped his cigarette on a tablecloth when he decided he wanted to dance with Nora. When the cigarette started to spark, the tenor failed to notice, even though he was the waiter on duty, because he was already upstairs with Dora. But now, Dora does not know any of that—she can only see Melchior jumping for the crown. With a start, Dora realizes that Melchior and Perry have hated each other since childhood.
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Before Melchior can wrest the crown from his brother’s hands, the Hollywood producer interrupts, announcing that he plans to take everyone at the party to Los Angeles. Specifically, he intends to turn the Shakespearean revue into a movie, written by Perry and starring Melchior. People applaud, then go home. The tenor (“our boyfriend,” as Dora calls him) accompanies Dora and Nora to the train station, then departs. Dora will never see him again.
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