by Amelia Gray
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FOR LEE
April 1913: the world enjoys the prosperity of modern days. Though the Great War is only a matter of months away, Europe blossoms with invention, artistic achievement, and social change. With little sense that a world conflict lies just around the corner, the growing middle class savors the feelings of peace, prosperity, and optimism.
Isadora Duncan has situated herself at the center of it all. Born in California, she convinced her mother and three siblings to join her in Europe at the age of twenty-two: the year was 1899, eve of the twentieth century. The Duncans arrived in London the same year the RMS Oceanic made its maiden voyage and Marconi transmitted a radio signal over the English Channel.
In a time when dancers laced themselves into corsets and audiences worshiped the rigid precision of ballet, Isadora made her life’s work a theory of dance which claimed that if the ideal of beauty could be found in nature, then the ideal dancer moved naturally. At twenty-six she gave a lecture in Berlin called “The Dance of the Future,” which derided the “deformed” muscles and bones of the world’s finest ballet dancers and decried the tragedy of restriction at the core of the genre. She urged her growing audience to consider the art and ideas of the Greeks, whose concept of Platonic form underscored Isadora’s assertion that art must strive for the emulation of nature. Her dances, appearing outwardly to be simple waltzes and mazurkas, sought to capture in their ease of movement the vital, visceral expression of beauty’s purest form.
* * *
Isadora was an instant sensation, reveling in sensational press, and she rode her reputation to glory. Barred from some theaters for performing in a tunic and bare feet, her intuitive, innovative skill found her an early audience in Vienna and Paris, London, Moscow, and New York.
Her acquisition of lovers was equally prolific, and quietly remarked upon in polite society. In 1906 she gave birth to Deirdre. The father was Gordon Craig, a director and stage designer she called Ted; four years later, she gave birth to her son, Patrick, with Paris Singer. A relentless capitalist, Paris was buoyed by the Singer sewing machine fortune yet haunted by his father’s success, a reminder of which could be found advertising nine hundred stitches a minute in every shopwindow in the modern world. Paris offered Isadora the possibility of reconciling her ambitious ideas with her fiscal reality, and although their partnership was marked with explosive arguments, they were happy together in the years after Patrick was born.
In the early days of the twentieth century Paris and Isadora gallivanted around Europe, children in tow. She worked tirelessly, giving performances and lectures and throwing parties that went on for weeks. With her long-suffering sister, Elizabeth, she created her first schools, which would instruct a generation of dancers in the type of natural movement that grew into modern dance. With that, the family took on the arduous task of building an artistic movement.
* * *
April 1913: Isadora Duncan is at the height of her power. She finds herself teetering on the cusp of a great change, both in her own life and in the world. An energy builds around her, a feeling that fascinates her and informs her work. She anticipates that an artistic revolution will emerge from that energy, and that she will stand at the forefront of an era devoted to the sublime.
Unfortunately, she is mistaken.
DUNCAN CHILDREN
DROWN WITH NURSE
Little Girl and Boy of American Dancer Hurled with Automobile into River Seine.
CHAUFFEUR LEFT POWER ON
And Car, Running Wild, Carried Them to Death—Mother Terribly Stricken by Loss.
Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES
PARIS. April 19, 1913.—A pathetic tragedy, which has cast gloom over all classes in Paris, took place in the suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine this afternoon, when the two beautiful children of Isadora Duncan, the American dancer, were, with their Scottish governess, carried by an automobile, running wild, into the Seine River and drowned.
Isadora Duncan, who had been spending the week resting at the Trianon Palace Hotel in Versailles, came to her town house this afternoon. Although a drizzling rain was falling, she decided to send her children and the governess back … in a hired automobile.
The car appeared in front of her villa in Neuilly at 3:30 o’clock. The children, dressed in white fur coats and gaiters, were conducted to the automobile by their mother, and, having been fondly kissed good-by by her, jumped merrily into the car.
The French chauffeur started off, the mother waving as the vehicle drew out of sight. It had not gone more than a hundred yards when the driver, coming out on the Boulevard Bourbon, which flanks the Seine, had to pull up to avoid collision with another car. The engine stopping, the chauffeur descended and turned the crank. Apparently, by an oversight, he had left the first speed gear on, and had no sooner started the engine than the powerful automobile shot across the road, the driver leaping swiftly aside and narrowly escaping being knocked over.
On the other side of the road there is no parapet separating the river from the road, only a gentle grass slope running from the sidewalk to the river’s edge. As the car sped down the bank shrieks from the two children and the nurse were followed by a loud splash as the automobile plunged into the river and sank in thirty feet of water.
Not a sign of the car appeared above the surface, and after a few seconds the eddying water became tranquil above the grave of the children and nurse.
PROLOGUE
The little one ate toast and cheese and kissed the cloth with buttered lips. The older chose a soup and sipped it plaintive from her spoon. Napkin in her lap, poor love, ever obedient, white lace twitching in the breeze. This crumb-coated pair, arms lifting for Mama, only know to take in love and churn it out again, offered up still warm from the soft shell of their delicate hands.
What is love but fingernails and backward glances? Picking the pills from the lace laid square at her neck, the girl smooths with spit the cotton rose pinned over her heart. White socks and soft shoes, sleeves like diving bells. The tailor blessed this dress and wished her well, stitching her name into its seams: Deirdre, ever serious, minding her manners while the grownups talk.
Her brother, Patrick, fresh as cut grass. Buttered baby in a high seat, soles of his kicking feet soft as a calf’s new cheek. Flour-skinned in curls, knowing without lesson the whole of love in golden waves. Patrick of the rumpled pleats, framed in red wicker. His sweetheart mouth! That handsome hair! He fusses when his toast is gone and gnaws the cloth his papa presses to his face.
There’s a winsome Pop, collar sharp and tied. The man feels most at home in a city that bears and shares his name, a proud piece of him inked on every calling card, cut into doorframes and hanging signs as greeting and deference in one: Paris. He came here as a sweet young man and grew to become as hungry and moneyed as the city itself, as damp-spirited in the mornings, as shining after dark. He skims the paper’s late edition, twisting his thick ring as he reads. Black onyx in gold, a gift to himself for his most recent birthday, rare only in the sense that he usually doesn’t need an excuse for extravagance. The resident men of Neuilly-sur-Seine retreat at the sight of him. They crowd the corners, hands to their lopsided mouths.
The body is a column. It begins with each foot steady in the dirt, rocklong fastened to the ankle, shin to knee bearing the pelvis, that busy fulcrum, friend to
the waist, spanning wing from root, the cup of power and the seat of it. The belly and back, jaw to the trunk, its sternum a wagging tongue. And there, buried in the rib like a line of charged powder, the solar plexus. Its ray powers far-flung satellites of the hands and mind, belly and breast, shoulder and sex, willing the feet to move. Any café in the world is a crowded constellation of these rays, a sea of waves, cut with men bearing cakes and tea on silver trays agleam through the drizzling spring.
The head waiter distinguishes himself immediately from the rest. The tallest among them, he works the patio on his toes to avoid ladies’ skirts and discarded silver, dogs using their own thin leashes to strangle themselves among chair legs, baguettes upended from inexact baskets, three pigeons angling at a forgotten slice of steak, a nosegay trampled to a purple smear, a pat of butter rolled in a grime comprised of chalk dust from the specials board, the dried mess from a practical-minded prostitute, and half a handful of sand from Sausset-les-Pins hitched on the suitcase of an old man who has just this afternoon returned, for the last time, from the sea.
The waiter leans benevolent, a cyprus over scrub, gracing the service with a subtle pot of tea, its silver spout an extension of his hand. He slides a cup without comment out of baby’s reach. His vest cinches with a polished clip, but he is otherwise unadorned: collar loose at the gentle skin of his neck, shoes free of hook and eyelet, hands bare to the unlinked cuff of his whites. His chin cradles the thin rind of his lips, browline carved with the blade of a boning knife. He draws a silver file from his vest, easing crumbs into his cupped hand before he slips away.
Following him means keeping close as he goes, dodging lesser staff as he vanishes to all but the one tucked into his wake.
The two of them glide inside to find a slick-walled cave of bolsters and peeling paper, a pastry case flanking one wall. A bulb strains to light an empty booth where a pile of cloth napkins await folding beside a bowl of soup.
By the booth, a bannister, from which a painted white birdcage hangs.Two wood-carved lovebirds touch beaks in a permanent state of distant affection. The stairs rise to another floor, growing darker, windows painted shut beside another set of stairs that lead in silence to the attic, where the wet jewel of a rat’s eye glitters to witness the single cot and basin in a room where the waiter sleeps. The day the others find the head waiter dead, they will bury him in the back under a sack of flour, and the rats will bring their own dark offering.
The waiter examines a haze of sickly tarts under glass, selecting a square of lemon cake to place on paper lace as a warm hand lands gentle on his gut. He tries to go, but it holds him still. The hand moves with enough leisure to belong to him, but with his own two in sight, this third is curiously foreign. Searching for a witness, he finds only the wooden birds.
The strange hand is joined by a second, and the pair slide across his slim hips. In watching the birds, he misses his silver file slipped away, a souvenir, before the hands twin themselves around his trunk, spreading to root at his waist.
The lemon cake shudders on its tray as a woman arranges herself before him. The waiter sees her shoulders, broad and bare, stretching two ways her smooth expanse of skin. His father, who sold cavern stones to sculptors, once found by touch a precious marble and laid it into his hearth as proof of his skill, a daily lesson for his boy, born with the man’s ears but not his gift, dull-eyed in the cradle, like a fish his mother said, but here it seems the son has found a monument to make any stoneman dash rasp and hammer to the ground—
I
On a sunny street in the Paris neighborhood of Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris Singer takes a dire inventory of their flat
None of it turned out as he had imagined. He blamed this on his own distraction, which kept him from looking too closely at the details when his agent found the place. There had been problems at the time with the property in Paignton, and in the way a simple pendulum swing can describe the boundaries of a man’s entire life, his attention to one meant neglect of the other.
In the Paignton home, which his father had named Oldway and lately had come to live up to its title in the failure of its various fixtures, Paris had sunk months into work. There were problems with the old foundation, sun-stained paint flaking on the tennis court, plans for an updated garden, which would need a season to seed—there would be no spring party, the girls would be disappointed—and all of it had made him eager to find something simple in France, somewhere close to the theater district, but not so close that they were sleeping in the wings. He wanted it ready to move in, large enough for the children to have their own room.
He allowed his local agent to convince him to look for furnished flats. Working out the details personally would have ensured a more precise result, but his agent made the point that as much as they all would have liked to see it, they truly didn’t need the chaise to be covered in worsted serge so that Isadora reclining might resemble a handkerchief laid across the breast of a royal officer. Paris meant to trust people more, and as an exercise, he allowed the local man to make the arrangements.
And so, of course, they arrived in November to find his rented flat on the drafty third floor of a thin-walled walk-up, the soft wood of the stairs sinking under their feet. The entry door was painted thickly shut in its frame and he had Isadora and the children stand back as he threw his weight against it, cracking it open to reveal a junkman’s collection of furniture and fittings scattered across a dismal set of rooms, a cemetery view on two sides, and an ominous spot on the kitchen floor that smelled strongly of kerosene. In the children’s room, an old window had been jammed open and nailed into place, ensuring that the street’s black ash would leave a leaden crust on their beds and a ribbon of filth would ring the tub after every bath. The only advantage was a view of the river, which wound its way across the west-facing windows. Isadora seemed to appreciate the jagged strips of half-torn wallpaper, speaking brightly of the bohemian aspect and going on about her early days in Europe, though later, when she couldn’t find a proper punch bowl, she sank into a malaise that required three days and a trip to Printemps to cure.
They stayed through the winter, stuffing rags into the children’s open window to keep out the cold. The nurse reported that the children had invented a game they called Urchin, wherein they covered themselves in soot from their toy chest, and spent many happy hours cleaning the fireplace. Patrick was too young to understand the game, but Deirdre was an observant one, and though the nurse tried her best to press Little Lord Fauntleroy and other mannered texts into her hands, she was interested only in the children she saw in alleys, speculating constantly about their lives and begging their humiliated nurse to introduce them. Deirdre had naturally decided that the other children were also playing a game, that they already had their breakfast and would run around and dirty themselves heroically like this until they were well tired, at which point they might find their nurse and go home to have a rest before afternoon lessons.
Leaving Isadora to deal with it all in her disinterested way, Paris spent most of February addressing labor concerns at the factory in London, but he returned again in March, hating the flat even more on his second arrival. It was worse than a hotel, where at least the things were cared for and a pleasant anonymity greeted him each morning. In a hotel, broken dishes would be cleared and thrown away, but at the flat, Isadora liked to keep shards of china in a paper bag on the counter. She talked of arranging the delicate filigreed pieces to make something even finer than what was broken, but she had no technique for it, and the bag ultimately gathered more of the ever-present black soot, as it waited for its chance to upend shards over whichever child found it first.
The accident happened early in the afternoon, after lunch. Paris had enjoyed a satisfactory pot-au-feu with beer. The other patrons exercised their usual theatrical shock over the children seated among them, but they all looked away when Paris turned to confront anyone directly. Isadora seemed near tears when she returned from the ladies’ room, and he understood
in her expression the feeling of endless scrutiny.
With lunch coming to an end, they worked out the schedule for the rest of the day. She wanted to return to her studio, citing some vague assignment that would keep her there for hours. It was obvious when she wanted them all to leave her alone. But Paris didn’t want to be saddled with the children either—quite literally, as ever since Ted Craig had uncovered a pint-size saddle in some filthy Florence shop, Deirdre took every opportunity to strap Paris in and goad him across the hardwood. So he ordered their nurse, Annie, to take them home for a nap, and he trusted that she would tidy the place before he returned.
The afternoon settled, they parted with kisses. Isadora went one way up the street, Paris went the other, and the children went with the nurse to their death.
* * *
He would learn almost right away. He hadn’t even sat down behind his heavy desk—a pity, they would have to move it back to England—when he saw from his window an officer running up the road, pushing gentlemen and ladies aside and sprinting knees-up like the anchor in a four-man relay. The door downstairs swung open, and he heard the man taking the stairs two at a time. As the steps came closer, they grew curiously softer, and there was a strange silence until the officer burst in, at which point the noise of the room returned, accompanied by a low humming tone that reminded Paris of the waterlogged feeling of coming out of a swimming pool. He was tapping his own head curiously as the man delivered the news.
He gathered his things, canceled his afternoon meetings, and followed the officer back to the flat. Though the officer would later report that Paris had been terribly dignified about the whole thing, there wasn’t a single noble urge in his mind at the time. It was relief he felt, as plain as day. The tragedy he knew would ruin him had come at last, and he didn’t have to dread it any longer.