Lifelines

by Caroline Leavitt

  Duse’s behavior prickled inside of him. She wasn’t alone in her research. Martin was reading, was watching and worrying about what was happening to Duse. He knew he could never get her to go to a doctor, so he called the doctors himself, he told them her symptoms over the phone. One doctor told him that April Fool’s Day wasn’t for another few months and to stop wasting his time like that, another told him that Duse was just going through the normal adaptation process of a new mother and to give it time. No one seemed worried, no one seemed concerned.

  He brought up hypnosis to her again. “Why don’t you trust me?” he said. “Why do you always have to think you’re in control? You’d still have your will. How many times do I have to tell you that all I do is suggest, for God’s sake? I don’t put anything there that wasn’t there in the first place. I can’t.”

  “You act like this was a disease,” she said.

  He let it alone. But he waited until she was in bed, and then, hating himself, he propped himself up on one arm and whispered to her. He had her raise her hand first, to make sure she was in trance, and it wasn’t until he saw the sluggish movement in her fingers that he relaxed.

  He spent over a half hour trying to ferret out an answer from her. He asked over and over why she was getting sensations about people, but she kept blurring her responses. He had never had anyone under hypnosis disobey. People always wanted to please the hypnotist. He told her she wouldn’t remember any of his questions and then he finally let her go back into her dreams, although he himself was awake. The clock was settled on the floor, but he felt every single sharp tick boring into him.

  He didn’t know what to make of any of it. Sometimes he thought she used those sensations as an excuse, that she relied on them when she didn’t want to do something. She started speaking about “bad feelings” when she didn’t want to go to a party, and if he insisted, if he prodded her into a shower and zipped up her dress himself, she would begin twirling her fingers against her temples, complaining of a headache, until he would snap at her that all right, they didn’t have to go, or he would go alone, guiltily leaving her.

  He forced her to go somewhere only once, to a play he had bought tickets to. They were just about to sit down when her arm brushed against the woman next to her and she froze. She told Martin she had to get out of there, that she felt something terrible brewing for the woman next to her. “Duse,” he said. When she sat through the play, he thought she was fine, but it wasn’t until they got home that he saw how washed out her face was, how silent she was. When he touched her, her skin was heated, she couldn’t stand without wavering a little, and he lifted her up and put her to bed. She ran a fever for a few days. There was no connection, he told himself; still, he couldn’t bear to have her look at him, he didn’t want to be reflected in those eyes of hers, not the way they were now.

  He tried to figure her out, to be his own psychologist. Lots of people had oddities. His own mother had been involved in some Pentecostal group. She came home one evening, took off her blue veiled hat and announced that most of the people in her church spoke in tongues, and she was damned if she was going to be left out. He remembered watching her practice, seeing her squinting hazily at herself as she preened in front of the mirror, as she tried babbling out sounds, trying to get carried away on the crest of words. She went to church three times a week. No one else in his family went to church as often as she did. They all got less and less religious as time eased on. Every Sunday he watched his mother settle her veiled hat on her head and pull on her white string gloves that she set to soak every night in a shallow dish of Lux liquid and water. He had only seen her speak in tongues once. She spit. He thought she was having a fit at first, that she was going into some sort of convulsion. Her teeth, he remembered, had looked loose, as if the very movement of her head might shake them free. He had half expected to see them hitting the floor, shattering like bright hard candies. He had shaken her and she had come out of it, her hair damp, her face triumphant. She had wanted his approval. He remembered that, and he remembered, too, how he couldn’t feel anything for her but embarrassment when she told him that she had seen the spirit. He couldn’t pretend any sort of pride for her.

  He thought about Duse’s mother. Anna was a little odd, he thought, wasn’t she—all that stuff about wearing some newspaper photo wrapped in a scarf. His logic trapped him. He wasn’t concerned about his mother now, or Duse’s; he didn’t worry about either of them. Duse, he thought, and then he slammed his hand down against a shelf so hard and fast that he split his knuckle. His skin was dotted with blood.

  Besides worrying about Duse, he worried about Isadora. He wanted her to have a normal childhood, and he didn’t like the way Duse checked her, the way she disdained thermometers in favor of her own touch, the way she’d hold up the edge of whatever Isadora had worn that day and shut her eyes.

  He tried to speak to Duse about it, but she snapped at him. “Oh for heaven’s sake,” she said. “Just who am I hurting?” He tried to do as much for Isadora as he could, to fill up that small life with normalcy, with memories he thought she might need. He took her places—the museums where he waited for the guard to disappear so she could patter her hands on the surface of the pictures, to the department stores where she loved to flutter her hands on the bright clothing, on the decorations. At home, when he saw Duse getting that way, staring into space while she was holding some object, he would take Isadora on his lap. He’d talk to her as if she were an adult. He told her about his problems, sometimes he asked her advice. It didn’t really matter that all she did was tug his buttons to her mouth or curl into his lap. She didn’t twist around looking for Duse, and he thought that the sound of his voice, the way it dipped and ebbed and rose, comforted them both.

  He didn’t know what to do, so he rationalized. He couldn’t believe the lines in the palm told anything other than the number of times you might clench your hand into a fist, he couldn’t believe you could pick up anything from someone’s clothing other than the smell of their perfume or their taste in clothing. Isadora seemed all right, and Duse was happy. He could see how pleased she was with herself, sometimes as soon as he walked in the door. And his own mother had splashed sounds about, had spoken in tongues, she said, and his parents had still managed to have a close, wonderful kind of marriage. He could remember that, how his atheist of a father, who took detours so he wouldn’t even have to drive by the church, would take his mother to her Pentecostal meetings, would sometimes even wait outside the flapping gray tent for her. That man had brought her dinners on a tray, and had served them to her, and she, in turn, had followed him with her eyes, as if she somehow needed to always keep him in her line of vision. They used to like to sit outside nights, brushing at the fireflies, talking long after the neighborhood was silent. They held hands, drunk on each other. You didn’t have to accept everything about a person, he reasoned. Everything didn’t have to make sense. The whole way he fell in love with Duse didn’t, that nagging pull of her photo, the way it had mesmerized him right into the marriage. He’d ride it out, he thought; she could bay at the moon and he’d love her.

  6

  Years later, whenever Isadora remembered her childhood, she would always refer to it as “the strange paradise.” It always irritated Duse to hear those words, to catch the way Isadora said them. Duse would snap at Isadora that there had been nothing strange about her early life in the least, that the only possible truth to that statement was probably the paradise part, and she wouldn’t listen when Isadora tried to disagree.

  Isadora’s first memories were of the enchantment surrounding her mother. Every birthday Martin took several rolls of film, never snapping anything but Isadora, never letting anyone or anything else get into the frame. He developed all of the prints, even the blurred ones, and Duse hung them in the picture gallery, right beside her own. Duse threw Isadora parties, inviting everyone she could think of, and afterward, when everyone left, she would take those pale, freckled hands of Isado
ra’s and settle them into her lap, palm up. Isadora could really have her palm read anytime she wanted (she usually made Duse read it three times a week, right before she was tucked into bed, and whenever she fell, scraping some skin from her hands, she would worriedly race those marred hands to Duse to see if anything had changed, she would let Duse’s voice skim the worry from her own), but birthdays were special, those readings were textured with extra detail. Duse would let Isadora touch her starred palms, and she told Isadora, too, that Isadora probably inherited a star, that it would erupt one day, suddenly, unannounced. Sometimes when Isadora played with the neighborhood kids, she would take their hands clean out of their pockets and would pretend to be able to read their palms, her small pale face serious against their grins. She never saw how they giggled behind their sleeves at her, how they shied away from Duse when Duse tried to touch their sweaters to see if she could pick anything up on them—Isadora wouldn’t see any of that for a while yet.

  Right from the start, Isadora wore outlandish outfits. Duse insisted that clothing expressed your sense of self, and even when Isadora was a baby, she let her choose her own clothing, bringing her up to the racks and letting her pat her hands against something. Duse didn’t care about price or colors mixing with colors or lengths; she never had anything altered. Other mothers always gave Isadora amused smiles—they talked about Duse among themselves—but other kids were envious of the bizarre colors, the costumy effects Isadora created. Martin, too, wasn’t worried. He always figured that soon enough Isadora would develop a sense of style, and in any case, clothing was never important to him.

  Isadora saw how it was with Duse, how she was always touching things people wore, fingering their jewelry, stooping right in the street to pick up a crumpled Pepsi can and rub the shine of it with her fingers, with her eyes clamped shut. “What are you doing?” she said over and over, repeating it until Duse opened her eyes again and saw her daughter. “Objects have identities as much as people do,” Duse told her. “The only difference is that people simply are, but objects have to become, they have to get their identity from the people using them.” Isadora didn’t really understand, not then, but still, she liked to bring home things for Duse to do readings on. She would sit curled by Duse’s knees, listening to the stories, imagining the faces of the people concerned in her head. Sometimes she kept the object itself—she had a whole shelf of old cola cans, of scraps of material, of old book covers—and she would sometimes take them down and handle them, remembering their stories as if they were books. Duse gave her that sense of wonder about things; she would never be able to look at anything without knowing it had a history to it.

  Even her own illnesses were sometimes magical. When she had fever and was delirious with pain and visions, Duse told her she was going out of her body, that she was visiting another plane, and it somehow comforted her.

  Isadora remembered, too, Duse’s experimenting, how Duse would sit for hours in her rocker, eyes closed, fingers closed around an object. She’d slow her breathing down, she’d become so motionless that she wouldn’t start when the phone suddenly rang, she wouldn’t rise to stop the sharp rapping of someone on their front door. Even the pressure of Isadora’s own hand wouldn’t seem to wake her up, to open those eyes of hers.

  Isadora got used to seeing Duse that way; Martin, she knew, was ruefully amused, because when he told Duse she was putting herself into hypnotic trance, she just looked at him blankly and then said that no, it wasn’t the same thing at all, what she did was quite different, something completely her own. As Isadora got a little older, she knew to leave Duse alone when she sat in her rocker, but still, Isadora liked sitting beside her mother, just watching, all the time feeling as though she was on the edges of something very wonderful.

  She was only frightened once. Duse suddenly began to speak, but the voice coming out of her was garbled, not her own, and her eyes remained shut. Isadora bolted upright, her feet skittering on the slippery patches of bare floor. Isadora watched Duse, but when Duse’s hands started moving, forming shapes from the air, Isadora pushed right out of that room. She stood against the far wall and clapped her hands to her ears so she wouldn’t hear. She didn’t come back until she heard Duse’s startled voice asking for an aspirin. “My head,” said Duse.

  Duse wouldn’t believe Isadora when she heard what had happened, she was upset at what she felt was a lack of control. Duse immediately wrote Olya, who wrote back that it sounded like a spirit had come through Duse, and that such a thing was a gold mine. She invited Duse to come back to work, she offered to pay her train fare, to pay for her baby to come along with her. “Anything, anything,” Olya wrote. “I could double my clientele in two days.” Olya said she had only known one medium herself, a very old woman in Russia, who used to bring back the spirits of the dead. Sometimes, too, loose spirits—spirits who wandered the earth—came through her, just to talk. “Not that I believe any of it,” Olya wrote.

  Duse didn’t know if she believed it either, but she didn’t like the idea of someone else using her. She didn’t tell Martin, and for a while she wouldn’t put herself into a trance state, she sometimes tried to do readings on objects just by touch, and when she failed, she let it go for a week or so. In all, she would wait two months, and when nothing came through her again, she began sitting in her rocker again, her fingers pulled around a sweater, a book, a keyring. She continued to watch her palm.

  Duse always made Isadora feel that both of them were somehow different from everyone else, somehow special, protected. She kept tracing out her stars for Isadora, calling them vaccines. “Like a disease?” Isadora wanted to know.

  Duse laughed. “Baby, it’s to protect you from being swallowed right up. The only sickness is being like everyone in the world.”

  It wasn’t a thing to tell a child. Isadora had no reason to doubt anything Duse told her; in fact, she was always trying to remember everything Duse ever told her, as if those words were a passkey into the secret world Duse seemed to inhabit, as if they would give Isadora passage, too. She couldn’t stop thinking about the vaccine; she carried it inside her head right up into fourth grade when she had to line up with the other children to drink a paper cup of sweet polio vaccine, a solution grainy with sugar. She had refused, had clamped her mouth shut against it. She wanted Duse’s vaccine, not this. The school nurse scolded her and asked her roughly if she was always this much of a baby, and then she tilted the paper cup up to Isadora’s mouth herself, she tipped Isadora’s head back. Isadora spat what she could on the floor.

  She was sent home with a note. “Leave it go then,” Martin said, sighing. “We’ll take her to a private doctor. She was probably just embarrassed or something.”

  “I wasn’t,” Isadora said.

  “You have to have it,” Martin said. “You don’t want polio, do you? You want to stay healthy.”

  “I want her vaccine,” Isadora said, looking to Duse.

  “What?” said Martin, his face baffled. “What are you talking about?”

  Duse narrowed her eyes at Isadora. “Trust me,” she said. “It’s part of my vaccine.” When Martin continued to look baffled, she laughed at him, she said that he was to trust her too, that she would fix everything.

  Isadora drank the sugary vaccine at a private doctor’s. But it wasn’t really over, not yet anyway. When Isadora ran a high fever later that year, Duse began to doubt the vaccine herself. She lay Isadora across a rubber sheet and packed her in ice cubes, trying to cool the heat in that body. She sat for hours by the bed, sometimes putting herself into a trance and placing her hands right on Isadora’s chilled skin, trying to get a reading. She held Isadora’s hands in her own, searching the lines, plumbing them just as if they had depths.

  It was Martin who took Isadora to the doctor. The doctor was evasive; all Duse heard was that the doctor was going to help Isadora. Martin heard the words “spinal tap,” but he heard, too, that it was a way to make sure Isadora didn’t have polio, that she was saf
e.

  The two of them waited while the doctor led Isadora into the other room. She was still feverish and cranky and she didn’t like the limp moist palm of the doctor. He perched her up on a black leather table and asked her quite solemnly if she liked fishing. She shrugged, but he really didn’t seem to care one way or the other about what she did or didn’t like, he said that fishing was exactly what they were both going to do. He helped her undress and then he draped a white cloth about her body. “Lie on your belly now,” he told her. She stretched out and shut her eyes, she waited for the briny smell of the sea to slick up into her nostrils, for the fish to flap up against her, when the doctor shouted that he had a bite. She felt something piercing her, stinging down into her spine. “Jellyfish!” she cried out, but he ignored her, he kept shouting that he was pulling a big one in now, and that it was really a whopper, with a gleam of teeth, just like kitchen knives, he said. Isadora screamed and tried to wrench herself free of him, but his hands were on her, pressing her face down into the leather so that the air she took in was filled with it.

  When he was finished, he turned her over and helped her sit up. “Where’s the fish?” she said, swiping at her tears. The doctor shook his head. “Too small,” he said. “Had to throw that thing right back into the sea.” She stared at him. When he took her outside, she wouldn’t look at Duse and she tried to weakly fight them when they put her coat about her shoulders.

  She was half listening, but when she heard them talking about the polio vaccine, about the spinal tap procedure, she stiffened. She was suddenly infuriated that they hadn’t told her the truth. She was nine; that wasn’t so young, she could have been told. She would have preferred knowing about what they were doing, would have even wanted to see that needle before it was thrust into her, deep, touching parts of her that she herself couldn’t reach.