The second time she dreamed about Martin, that night, they were on top of the money. It was scattered, green new bills, all over the damp earth, and she and Martin were making love. She thrashed around and the sheets turned into dirt, she could feel something sharp against her. The earth must be seeded with stones, with walnuts from a tree. She moved about so much she was tangling in her sheets, she knocked over the water pitcher, drenching herself, making a wet rag out of her sheet. A nurse rushed in and shook her awake. Duse was angry when she blinked in the bright hospital white, when the damp earthy smell gave way to liniment, to antiseptic. “I haven’t finished,” she said. She meant the lovemaking, the tenseness that swelled her body, but the nurse thought she meant ripping that room apart, ruining the hospital things, and the nurse clucked her tongue. “We could strap you down to this very bed,” the nurse told her, readjusting the pitcher, stripping the sheets from the bed, not caring how Duse winced against her touch.
Duse tried to shut her eyes, to find the dream again, and when she couldn’t, she moved her own hand under the sheets. She bucked and tumbled in that bed, holding herself in just enough so she wouldn’t knock anything over, but then she was weeping, because without Martin, it wasn’t enough for her. She was fretful for another skin against hers, another passion, and she had to go to sleep so she could dream it. For the first time since she had been in that place she buzzed for a sleeping pill. The nurse smiled at her. “Now we’re being smart,” she said.
She never dreamed about him again.
Duse kept studying her hand, watching that lifeline mark itself off, seal out the years. She had never seen a deathline thwarted. That had always been the one line you just couldn’t change. In a way, it made things easier for her. She stopped trying to visualize her health, stopped wasting her energies trying to stay nourished, and she refused to cooperate with anyone in the hospital. What difference did it make what they did to her now?
She did try to make things easier for Isadora. “I won’t come back,” she said, speaking in her raspy voice. She said that only because she wasn’t quite sure she could manage to get back, and she didn’t want Isadora making that appearance a test of her gift, and then, disappointed, fragile with anger, concluding once and for all that it was all a hoax.
“Don’t talk like that,” Isadora said.
“I wanted to make you feel better, and look at you, crying.” Duse lifted up her hand to Isadora, she touched her girl’s arm. “Daniel’s not dead,” she said. “You remember that.”
“I don’t know what to do with that,” Isadora said.
“You will,” said Duse.
She didn’t do very much after Isadora had left. The nurse came with her pill, and she slid it under the pillow. She could toss it out later. Duse hoped she didn’t die in her sleep. That seemed like the worse kind of cheat to her, the worst of all deaths you could have. When she told the doctor why she wouldn’t take any more sleeping pills, he gave her a queer, hard look, he told her he had no intention of letting her die, that in fact, she was getting better, and talk like that wasn’t conducive to getting well.
When Duse had her second stroke, the next morning, she was just starting to rouse, sliding into that half stage before waking, never really sure whether she was moving toward getting up or just dreaming that she was.
Isadora’s Epilogue
Isadora would never really accept Duse’s second stroke. There were other kinds of deaths than just the one riding in your palm—Duse had said that—but the doctor never liked it when Isadora said how much it bothered her to see Duse suspended in a half death like that. He narrowed his face at her, he made his eyes sharp and grim, and he said that Isadora should get right down on those blue-jeaned knees of hers and pray her thanks to God that Duse was living at all.
“Half living,” said Isadora.
No one could give her any certainties. Duse’s doctor said that there was never any defined boundary for a disease; he said that every person really colored their ailment, everyone made an illness peculiarly theirs and theirs only. Duse, he said, might regain her speech, might be able to eventually flutter some movement into her arms and legs, even her memory might reappear. He didn’t know. But then again, he said, it was always possible that Duse could stay in that limbo until yet another stroke, or her death.
It did something to Isadora. She had shouted at him. She hadn’t cared that the nurses flustered toward her, willing her silence, that heads turned. She had accused that doctor of everything she could think of. She said he had probably overmedicated Duse right into this stroke, she accused him of not medicating Duse enough. The doctor shook his head at her. He held up a yellow plastic file and said that Duse’s blood work showed a complete innocence of any of the medication he had been prescribing her. “That’s not normal,” he said. “There should at least have been some residue. She must not have been taking those blood pressure pills at all. She was rational, she was an adult. What did you want us to do, hold her mouth open and force those pills down her throat? That medication was to help. If you want to blame someone, stop getting all fired up at me; look to the real person in charge.” He sighed audibly. Isadora could almost see the whooshing of air. “It happens, you know,” he told her. “She lost her husband, maybe she wanted to be with him.”
“No, that’s not it,” Isadora said, but he ignored her, he went right on talking about the mechanism of stroke, how erratic it was and how no one could predict anything. “Hey look,” he said, “she could have had another stroke regardless.”
Duse stayed in intensive care for three weeks. Isadora sleepwalked from the house to the hospital, always carrying something in her hand, although they wouldn’t let her put it in the ward. She had flowers, candy Duse couldn’t eat, books she wouldn’t read. She would walk carefully toward Duse, her smile patchy on her face. For the first moments when she saw Duse, when she saw all that red hair slanted on the pillow, she could think Duse was just in trance, just concentrating. It was something she did for herself; it made it easier to be there, to see the eyes unfocused.
She was startled to find she wasn’t the only visitor. Clients kept trickling in, and it was one of them, a woman in her forties named Ellen Perry, who told Isadora, outside intensive care, that she thought it was time for Duse to be home.
“You won’t even have to hire a nurse,” she said. “I used to be an RN, worked for years, and I still know what to do. I want to care for that woman. I spent all my Mondays last year at your mother’s, you know that? I sobbed over my coffee because that son of a bitch of a husband of mine left me for some eighteen-year-old boy. You know what that mother of yours told me? You know what she said? She studied my hand like it was an encyclopedia and then she said that my lines were changing, that they showed good things. She showed me a different destiny, a different plan. I could get through the days knowing that.” Ellen made a small face. “I know it sounds crazy, but I could bear the pain knowing it was going to get better. And it has.
“It’s up to you, of course,” said Ellen. “I could commute or I could move in. You won’t be there. You have school, your whole life. And you can forget about paying me. I don’t want money, not from Duse.”
“Of course I would pay you,” said Isadora.
Ellen smiled. “Good. You want to do it then.”
It was Ellen who became a kind of surrogate Duse for Isadora, who got that girl through the details. Ellen decided how it should be, when she should move in, how she should be paid. She even hired a lawyer to set it up so she could draw her pay from Duse’s bank, so Isadora wouldn’t even have to deal with that. Isadora sat on the front porch and watched Ellen move in, and by evening that woman had dinner for the two of them, and then they went to pick up Duse.
Isadora wandered the house. She was always going in and out of her mother’s room. Sometimes she would just sit on the bed and wait for Duse to say something, to lift up those hands of hers and gesture. If Ellen walked by, she would come in and sit with Isado
ra. Ellen was never as upset by Duse’s stroke as Isadora. Ellen said it could just be a permanent trance, that as a nurse, she had never really seen a stroke that gentle. You could tell that just by Duse’s eyes, she said, by the way they always seemed to be dusting across the room, never settling, almost dizzy with life. “I’ve seen lots of strokes,” Ellen said, “so I should know.”
Ellen said that things like that—tragedies—were in the palm and that sometimes there was a real purpose for them, a way to learn. If Duse didn’t have memory left, then it was even more like a reincarnation in life, a way of starting fresh. Isadora, listening, let herself be lulled and lightened, let herself believe because she wanted to, but as soon as she stood up and went into another room, her mind would crowd. She would see how it was, she would see Ellen washing out Duse’s bedpan, cutting up Duse’s dinner meat so fine and so tiny that it was hamburger. When Isadora felt her tears, she went to Ellen, and that woman would tell her about lines and tragedy and incarnations all over again.
As the summer faded toward the fall, Isadora discovered others beside Ellen—a whole crazy, devoted network of clients. They were mostly women, middle-aged, well dressed, and although they all came to the house one by one, they quickly found and formed a bond with one another. Someone said that they all really should have done that a long time ago, when Duse was well, and Isadora, listening, thought how much Duse would have hated that, how she would have dismissed all of them as sheep.
The network knew who Isadora was. It startled her at first the way some of those women would recite back parts of her life to her, almost claiming Isadora’s heritage as their own. And they all had stories about what Duse had done for them, how she had given them confidence by showing them the talents in their lines or how she had found priceless rings and old sweaters. One woman even claimed that Duse had cured her of bronchitis, but Isadora looked doubtful. “Duse never claimed to be able to do anything like that,” she said, but the woman shook her head, the woman said that Duse just never took enough credit, and that was all.
Sometimes, though, it was all a little sad. The women who paraded up that walk didn’t really have any other place to go. One woman told Isadora that she had been searching for weeks for another palmist to replace Duse. She was certain, she said, that something very odd was happening in her lines, and she had to find someone to interpret it for her. She said that the only people she had been able to locate either charged extravagant rates or they had their offices up five floors of rickety stairs in what she called the “hell zone” of the city. Someone else told Isadora that they had placed an ad in the paper. Isadora flinched a little; she knew all about ads. “I got stacks of mail,” the woman told her, “but stuff from college babies, kids doing research, from bored old women who had read a few paperbacks, and some business cards from some real hucksters wanting to sell me different machines to open up my own powers.”
Ellen was philosophical. “The thing is,” she said, “no one is Duse. That’s the real trouble, right there.”
The network cared for Isadora. She wanted to stay close to Duse so she let one of the women pull some strings so Isadora could go to school at the University of Wisconsin, ten minutes away, instead of New Mexico. Ellen wouldn’t let her commute though; she reminded her how much Duse had hated anyone who let himself be martyred and Ellen would never be able to live with herself if she let Duse down by allowing Isadora to stay in the house.
The whole network was like that, all of them pushing Isadora out, forcing her into some semblance of independence. They think I don’t belong here with them, Isadora thought, they think I’m not like them. She had mixed feelings about that. The way they all knew they belonged was something Isadora thought she might like—it was the thing that welded them together that she doubted. At first, to get Isadora out of the house, she was asked to do errands, to get bread or milk. By the time she got back to the house she’d see the loaf of bread pushed to the very back of the bread box, she’d see the milk in the bottom of the freezer. She began to notice, too, how the network treated Duse now, how they almost started making a church of her (The Church of Duse again, Isadora thought wryly). Isadora began leaving the house just to escape all the piety. Duse would hate that, she thought; she’d take one look at all that adoration on those faces and order all of them off her property, out of her house.
She came home one night to find Duse’s hair sliced off, stiffly waved, banged to her brows. “Doesn’t she look nice?” Ellen prompted uneasily, holding up a mirror so Isadora could see just how the back waved.
“My God,” said Isadora. She wanted to pick Duse right up and get her into a shower, to dump those cement curls under the spigot and wash them free. She wanted to make Duse familiar to her again, she wanted to make her real.
Ellen was saying that a cut like that was a real snap to care for and that absolutely everyone needed a change, didn’t Isadora agree? Isadora reached out her fingers to touch Duse’s hair; then, instinctively, her fingers found her own disheveled mane. She clutched hanks of her own hair, she gave little nervous tugs to see how firmly rooted it was. “You like it, don’t you?” Ellen said. Isadora’s hand retreated, fished down into her pocket.
“You’ll get used to it,” said Ellen.
Isadora spent a lot of time in the picture gallery. She touched Duse’s features, she touched her own. She began to think that maybe her grandfather had been right, that pictures had nothing at all to do with real flesh, that the camera lied and lied and lied. Those prints were only as real as memory, she thought, and everyone knew just what damage different memories could do to faces. She could look at prints of Duse’s strange open palms and remember how those hands had always been scented with perfumed creams, that image would dominate everything else. Duse, though, would look at that print and feel the lines working their way into her hand.
She concentrated on the real Duse. She sometimes went upstairs and gave her mother manicures, lifting up Duse’s hands, one at a time, creaming the skin, leaving the nails clean of polish because Duse had always said that color destroyed the natural beauty of the hand. When Isadora was finished, she would press those hands against her own, she would try to match up the lines.
She got through her schooling. It was lonely for her in Madison. She didn’t feel any sense of place. The network found her an apartment, very clean and bare, and she wouldn’t buy one thing for it. She didn’t want it to have any personality, she wouldn’t stamp it with anything of herself. Sometimes she had bats, and she kept a special hard-bristled broom for them that she learned to wield and threaten with, but she never could make contact, she never could kill even one of them.
She once shut a bat into a room, but she couldn’t stand to hear it banging against the walls, trying to get outside, so she went outside into the Madison winter, the cold so stiff and bony that her breath seemed to waft out solid. When she came back, her hands chapped and red, her whole body shivering because she had grabbed the first thing in her closet instead of her heavy winter coat, the room was silent. Even so, she waited before she opened the door; she turned on the radio so the bat would somehow know she was here, so it, in turn, could let her know that it still lived. She finally called Manpower and hired someone—paid them twenty-five dollars—just to come and remove the bat. She could tell that the man they sent over thought she was nuts. He slid his gaze over her, he shook his head. It took him all of five minutes. He went in with a covered dustpan and came out rattling it so she could hear the bat was there, and when she stepped out of his way, he grinned. Isadora didn’t want anything to do with death.
She tried to fill her life with mindless detail. She made lists for herself to go shopping, to get to the cleaners. She spent hours rearranging every single one of her drawers. She saw a lot of movies and she tried not to think, not to see how alone she was.
In the end, though, she couldn’t keep all her yearning at bay. She began missing Daniel again. Sometimes she thought that if she only knew that he was a
live, she could get through her days. She could even see other people if she could patch his name into her faltering conversation, if she could still connect him up to her. “My lover is coming back soon,” she said aloud. “My lover is on vacation for a while where there aren’t any phones or letters.”
She sent Christmas cards to his parents, making them herself out of expensive watercolor paper, inking in the designs herself. She wrote a few lines sometimes, but Daniel’s parents never responded; she never even got a store-bought card from them. She wondered if they had anything to tell her. Maybe Daniel’s body had been found in the Pacific, his car parked right in the tide, the whole floorboard alive with tiny sand crabs and minnows. She wouldn’t know, the police wouldn’t contact her because she wasn’t his wife. Damn identity, she thought. She sometimes thought about calling his parents, but she was afraid. Maybe it was better not to know, to just hope.
Sometimes, too, she tried to find Allison. She went to the library and plundered the Boston phone book. She searched the wedding sections of the paper, but both were blank and innocent of her name. Sometimes, when Isadora was really tired, when the library was cool and silent of people, she would shut her eyes. She would think DANIEL, she would think ALLISON, and then she would jerk her eyes open, she would flicker her gaze down into the paper before her, the death pages on her left, the weddings on her right. It was a stupid thing to do, a child’s game. Only Duse had thought Isadora had a gift.
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