All Is Beauty Now

by Sarah Faber

  But when she told the girls this morning that their father would be in hospital for at least two weeks, there were no tender, dignified tears. Evie wailed and Magda stomped and the question of why—why was she doing this to them?—still rang in her ears. Why now, if they were moving to Canada so he could get treatment, and why couldn’t they bring the maids, and why was she ruining everything? Sitting here on Luiza’s bed, turned down and with perfect hospital corners, she almost cries again remembering how upset they were and all that’s still to come. All the things she’ll have to do by herself once they arrive in Canada: cook meals, do the laundry, manage the accounts. Until those few months they spent in Florida, Dora had never even made a bed. She had tried to learn to cook, but after a few burned dinners they lived off frozen, prepackaged meals from the Piggly Wiggly. They all became unmoored somehow, during those months without Hugo at their centre, their sun. The younger girls, at least, had school to fill their days, but she and Luiza wandered and sighed, watched hours of television, scratched at crossword puzzles, and made idle circles in the rattan swing, staring out at all the tidy driveways, leading to houses with saner families inside. Luiza went for walks sometimes and Dora did the shopping, but mostly their lives were left to stall, held by that half-furnished house smelling faintly of mould.

  At the time, she thought Florida was hell. But it would be worth it, she told herself, if the drug could bring Hugo back to himself, unbeholden to the extremes of his disorder. Now, Dora understands that Florida was merely purgatory. Hell is now. Hugo lost to her again and again, penitent one minute, brutal the next. On the way to the hospital, he was agitated, running his splayed hands up and down his pant legs, seeming trapped in the car, in his body. Then he held her face in both hands, told her softly that she was a frivolous person who had endured something terrible. That he and Evie were artists who could make their suffering an act of beauty, while Magda was ferocious and would claw her way out.

  ‘But you,’ he said, ‘what will happen to you?’

  First, jealous rage, then remorse, followed by casual malice. The usual treatment—Thorazine—will put him somewhere in between. Manageable, until the next time. He had to go.

  Absentmindedly, Dora leafs through a photo album, Luiza’s last scrapbook. Halfway through there’s a picture of the maids and the youngest girls in front of the house when they are about four and five, Odete holding Evie, Maricota holding Magda, and the girls each holding a doll nearly as big as they were. Though the picture is in black and white, Dora recognizes the dolls. Each doll matches her owner; Magda’s is blond with a red dress, like she always wore. Evie’s doll has red hair and a green dress, just like her. Luiza always wore blue. It seemed so simple once. Auburn, blond, red. Blue, red, green. Pretty, smart, nice. Had she ever really believed that was all they needed to be? Constrained to familiar, amenable borders—within and without. Her three lovely, little dolls. Shut up in this white house, with its eight-foot walls and barred windows. The fortress, Luiza called it. It looks better and brighter in the photo, but it was a different house then. An acre of land! And inside those walls, how they ran and ran. She’d once believed that kind of life was enough. And what of the house they’re moving to—split-level, ranch style—already arranged for in some place called Willowdale, where there are no barred windows, no shattered glass embedded atop foot-thick bulwark, but also no orange trees in the yard, no clamour of bougainvillea, no scent of eucalyptus upon waking. There will be a few pretty things in spring and summer, and then all those dormant months inside, waiting. Skeletal trees out back, deciduous shrubs in front. They’ll have to gather all their colour in such a short time. Hell is here, without you. Hell is your father, without you. Hell is Canada, without you.

  She keeps flipping through the pages: photos of Luiza at seventeen, eighteen on the beach, in the garden, always surrounded by friends, by boys. She’d nearly forgotten Luiza’s expression of weary petulance, as though bored by all the attention and admiration. It wasn’t long after these pictures were taken that Luiza seemed to lose interest in her friends, and Dora knows now it was because of Carmichael. She wonders if, like her, Luiza fed on the attention only someone like him could provide; if her daughter had used Carmichael for some of the same reasons she herself had. If, when this reserved and brooding man broke down for her, she felt as though she’d won. Disgusting idea. What if Luiza can hear her? Feel her mother’s unkind thoughts like a cold wind, wherever she is. Alone. She wants only to remember Luiza like everyone else does. Beautiful Luiza, melancholy Luiza. Such a sensitive girl! But the more Carmichael told her about her own daughter, the more she remembered of those last painful years, their thousand brittle exchanges. Luiza had been lost to her long before she disappeared.

  Dora turns the page and finds another photo of Evie and Magda, playing in the driveway. A few days ago, she came back from the beach to find the girls riding their bikes, Evie with a whole raw chicken wrapped in a doll’s dress inside her bike basket, turning circles in the driveway. She said she found it in the sink, where the maids must have left it to defrost before disappearing to some other corner of the house to pack and clean. Dora’s been asking too much of them lately. So she took Evie and the chicken inside and washed her daughter’s hands, then cleaned the damn thing herself. She worries that Evie is regressing in some strange way; she seems to be getting younger while Magda hardens and ages beyond her years.

  But these small, absurd moments belie the serrated edges of their lives. The girls have seen and heard things they shouldn’t have, things they couldn’t possibly understand, things she herself doesn’t understand. Nights when Hugo cried out, terrified by visions. Together, she and Luiza did their best to protect the girls from the worst of it. But what about Luiza?

  Following a few sporadic hospitalizations when Luiza was still a child, several years passed when Hugo seemed steadier. Then one night, shortly after Evie was born, Dora woke to the muffled sound of gasping in another room. For days before, Hugo had paced the house in silence, and she herself had been anxious, her body waiting, even in sleep, for some burst of chaos. She rose from the bed, steadied herself on the nightstand, then tripped on the bassinet in the corner of the room where Evie lay asleep, momentarily forgetting it was there. Evie squirmed a little but didn’t wake, and Dora, still confused, wondered how she might cover the baby’s ears. Eventually, she followed the sound, her head heavy and full as though stuffed with saturated wool, until she found him fully dressed, curled up, and sobbing in the bathtub. When he saw her, he began to moan.

  ‘Nothing, oh god there’s nothing, oh god god.’

  She knelt beside the tub, reaching for him with heavy arms, weakly trying to pat his head with one hand while using the other to cover his mouth, stuff his desperation back in. ‘Ssssshhh. Shush, shush.’

  The previous times, he had retreated into himself, depressed for weeks. But this was a crude anguish, different from before. She pressed harder against his mouth, surprised that he didn’t struggle, and couldn’t think of anything else to say, she was so thick and uncoordinated with fatigue from Evie’s frequent night-wakings. Her upper body was now half in the tub with him, one leg still bent beneath her while the other stretched toward the door as she tried to push it closed with her toes. Then the door pushed open against Dora’s foot and Luiza squeezed in holding one-year-old Magda, who was whimpering in her arms, pressing her eyes shut against the light. The pain of sharp-edged wood scraping over her toes focused Dora enough to make her cry out.

  ‘Out! Get her out of here!’

  ‘God, please, there’s nothing. Nothing. What have I done. Oh god.’

  But Luiza, stunned and staring at her father in the bathtub, remained frozen. Magda began to wail.

  Dora’s voice grew more strained and panicked as she yelled at Luiza to take Magda back to bed. Then the sound of more cries, sharper and more insistent, from her bedroom.

  ‘Evie,’ said Dora, finally lowering her voice and raising her hands to cov
er her chest. Her nightgown was suddenly damp as breast milk soaked it quickly and thoroughly. After three children, it was still a shock that her body could act so independently of her will.

  Luiza began to hand Magda to her, saying, ‘I’ll get the baby.’

  The thought of a frightened child holding a tiny, pulsing infant propelled her forward. ‘No!’ said Dora, pushing a still screaming Magda back toward Luiza while trying to stand on her crushed toes.

  Luiza stood motionless, holding Magda in one arm while covering an ear with her free hand. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  Two babies crying, a grown man sobbing nothing, nothing, nothing—it was impossible to think, and Dora wanted to hold her oldest daughter most of all but there was no time. She worried about waking the maids in their separate part of the house. At that point, she was still managing to hide the worst of it from them.

  ‘Take Magda into my bed and I’ll get the baby.’

  Dora climbed into her bed and nursed Evie, then gathered Magda (quieter now, just the occasional snotty shudder) toward her with her other arm. She began to sing—Hush, little baby—and looked up to find Luiza standing stiffly beside the bed, her face still so uncertain, still waiting for instruction. Dora nodded toward the door. She’d simply meant for her to close it and then come back into the bed so they would all four be together as they waited for Hugo to calm down. She hadn’t meant for her daughter to leave, hadn’t meant for her to go to him. But Luiza went through the door and shut it behind her.

  Once both babies had fallen asleep again, Dora put Evie back in her bassinet and Magda back into her crib in the next room. She tiptoed to the bathroom and opened the door slowly and quietly, holding her breath just as she had when she used to walk into Luiza’s nursery and find him there, standing over the crib, and the question would penetrate her mind painfully: had he hurt her? But she was always fine. And she was fine this time too. Luiza lay with him in the bathtub, asleep, her body draped over his, arms embracing him, legs folded in front of her. Two curled embryos, one on top of the other. Dora thought he must be crushed, the full sleeping weight of a ninety-pound child resting on his hips, his ribs, pressing him against the hard cast-iron tub. But he was quiet at last, his eyes open and staring straight ahead. He didn’t move when she placed a bath towel over them and walked out leaving the door open, the light on.

  And this, or some variation of it, was what they did for years: Dora took care of the babies and Luiza took care of Hugo, and that was when she began to lose her eldest daughter. Because her focus had to shift to her father, and she was just a child, after all; she had to choose. To become his nursemaid, devote all that care, mimic adult duty to such a degree—it was too much. Yet Luiza insisted, and in some private corner of herself, Dora was relieved. And she had allowed it.

  She knows she should have left the girls with Luiza and gone to him herself, but it never seemed to help; Luiza was better with him. And so she hadn’t retrieved her daughter from the bathroom all those years ago and lain there with her husband herself; she hadn’t protected her. And in failing to, she had blunted Luiza, and her capacity to live a normal, starry young-girl life. How could she ever leave them—her mother, so diminished, and her father, broken?

  It was several more years before he was diagnosed. And though they went on in this way, tenuously, and somewhat uneasily—listening for uninterrupted sentences, oddly inflected, or the screech and topple of a chair too quickly thrust back—they were often quite happy. There was a good life between poles. A golden life! Until Florida.

  ‘I could have saved the girls from the worst of it,’ she remembers Luiza saying now. And Dora thought then—but never said—that Luiza was also worth saving.

  How else to explain her sad, ragged search in the village, the basilica, the café for dingy lovers. The last, forlorn act of a mother trying not to succumb to despair. Running about like a March hare in those hills, infected with fantasy, a side-effect of too many years living with a madman and a dreamer.

  She continues to leaf through the scrapbook slowly, finding nothing but photographs and the expected bits of ephemera—dried flowers, postcards, ticket stubs from films and a concert Hugo took Luiza to for her birthday. Dora flips back to the beginning and turns the pages more slowly this time. She scans the book again and stops at the last page: a picture of a church she’s never seen before, whitewashed with terracotta shingles, with a bell tower and a crucifix perched above the centre scrollwork. She gently pulls it from the black page, pieces of which stick to the photo where it was glued down. But she can still read a few handwritten words on the back: Convento. Ana Claudia.

  When Maricota comes back from grocery shopping, Dora is sitting at the kitchen table with the photo in her hands. She’s not nervous exactly. She has, over these past chaotic years of Hugo’s highs and lows, learned to contrive a state of calm within herself, a detached interest that allows her to observe everything while feeling little. She feels later, in private, when the cloudburst has cleared and she can tend her emotions alone. She cries at kitchen tables, after everyone is in bed, or quietly, in cars, with kind chauffeurs. Luiza used to say her calm was unsettling, unnatural, and it’s true that Dora sometimes fears she feels less and less. But for now, it is useful. Her hand is steady as she passes Maricota the photograph. It’s important to Dora that she not pointlessly upset this woman who she knows has grieved almost as much as she has, and who they are leaving behind.

  ‘I found this in Luiza’s scrapbook,’ says Dora. ‘Is it yours?’

  ‘Sim. It’s from my sister.’

  ‘When did she send it? Recently?’

  ‘Ela está morta.’

  Of course. From meningitis years ago. Maricota took the week off. They both look down to avoid facing the fact that Dora has forgotten.

  ‘Why would Luiza keep this in her scrapbook? She only kept family things in there.’

  ‘Não sei. She asked me for it a few weeks before—’

  And here is the difference between her and other people, Dora notes; Maricota’s eyes fill with tears, the hand holding the photograph trembling until Dora closes her own two hands over Maricota’s wrist, trying not to bend the photo. It feels like an awkward gesture, but the crying stops and eventually the woman is still.

  ‘I told her once about my sister, about the convent, about how much I wanted to go there. How it’s a beautiful place of peace and worship and the sisters spend their days in prayer. And they make these little things—nice things—candles and rosaries and dried flowers. I always think about what a nice life that is. Making things. And Christ. And so much quiet.’

  Dora has to suppress a laugh then, having already appeared inhuman enough for one day. That this poor woman who yearned for a life of quiet contemplation and handicrafts should have ended up with them. With Hugo. Who once threw the steaks Maricota was defrosting out the kitchen window because he was convinced they were cross-sections of a human thigh. But here she remains, her sweet, fat hand held out, gripping the photograph, apologizing for telling Luiza about God.

  ‘She kept asking me what it is to believe, and she asked for the picture. I thought it was okay, just Luiza’s tristeza.’

  Dora assures her it was harmless and asks for more details about the convent. She asks about Maricota’s sister and her life there, and smiles at her stories, and sits perfectly still, all the while hiding the shuddering inside.

  HUGO

  Hugo paces in front of the window in his hospital room while the nurse pours water from a plastic pitcher. They call it a ‘recovery centre,’ but it’s full of doctors and nurses and machines and pills. A hospital for misfits and lunatics and those who won’t co-operate. But it is the ‘best’ in the country, Dora always reminds him, so he gets his own room, with a door that locks from the outside. Out on the rolling, green lawn, automata glide, unfocused jelly in place of eyes. These, he thinks, are his final days, and that nurse is laughing at him.

  They want to scour his brain, dig o
ut the girl at the core of it, the star of the fruit, the one in the middle. The midst. I get midstsy, he sings. Hopeless as a kid lost at sea.

  How purple! says laughy nurse, and the window behind her shatters, exposing more humanoids slumped in wheelchairs, silently pushed along. His ears are weeping blood and his very thoughts show themselves to her, raised red welts on tumid skin. Purple indeed! What would life in any prison be without extravagant thoughts?

  You’re conspiring to leave me.

  A corona of light pulses around her head. She recedes with each cry, then surges forth, brighter, more awful than before. Eyes platinum, tears of molten silver, cheeks stained with pomegranate.

  Take me with you! My heart is singing.

  Atomized, his daughter scatters on the south wind. She says it’s not time yet.

  Today, she’s trying to dope him up with a handful of Dora’s Black Beauties—they would have him disintegrate in this place.

  Never mind, you duchess of nothing, it fortifies me, trifling with tarts like you. Come, come, merkin, don’t run off—it’s this meandrous limb of mine, indifferent to my virtue. (But she is gone, and he’s alone again.) That one’s not to be trusted. Scent of dying flowers: alyssum, pasques, love-lies-bleeding. All gone, all rotten. Garçonete, cauterize this spoilt portion of my meat! He was a sophisticated man once. Evie, Magda? What is that racket in the hallway? Is it his daughters? Or Dora, spreading anxiety wherever she goes? I wish it were my best one, my Luiza, my gone one. Gone on the wind. She quick-churned into a dancing stream, broadcast on the ocean, far-flung. Abandoned? Drops of her still come out the taps, even here.

  I’ll dance with you soon.

  He is dilating. Stricken with a cursed languor. But meiosis begins to contrive within him, until there is enough matter hatched to make two of him, then four—an army of Hugos! Gemini, with golf club rising. The feeling of glass cracking, giving way, shattering as I wailed. And later, his organs, shifting beneath my fist. Even on a plate, they would make a sad offering in exchange for all he took from me. Hear our name resound. Hugo! they will say. But even the old king stinks of mortality, while I moan and die.