Isadora

by Amelia Gray

  All this time I’ve been ignoring the other spirits in this hall. Dull and crowding, these ghosts hang around though they could take up residence anywhere: in the center of their childhood homes, above an old lover’s bed, drifting through a lightning storm curled around the lightning itself, chasing it to its earthly end, crushing life and scorching a place on the earth. Despite all their freedom, they float obediently beside their own cubbied ash. Maybe spirits can enjoy only as much energy as they brought to life; most of them wasted their time on the planet and are damned to commune dully with similar ghosts, taking the days in measured sips, as on some broad human veranda.

  Étienne in a coughing fit excused himself for what he declared would be our final moments together. But the three of us know these moments are not final: this is only the first shy conversation of a new phase. We’ve passed the deadline the risen Christ set in pushing aside the stone, which means I have to push aside the thought of them in some awful cave, soiled and sobbing, taking up their burial offerings and toddling into sour darkness so black that their eyes strain and soften, finding with their searching hands the occasional dead canary, which would feel to them like a rabbit’s foot.

  The children are alive, in their way. They persist, subtle and dormant, and their souls are tucked safely in triumvirate Mother. They have become the winter earth, which grows without our knowing.

  After the ceremony, Paris finds himself kneeling before a rather unsettling depiction of the Seven Holy Brothers

  Guilt, Paris found, was a sturdy emotion. It could keep for years in the temperate climate of memory, stacked like a hearty cheese among moldering rounds of love and fear. Guilt constructs a narrative: the old woman puts down her fork to think of a girl she shunned on the walk from school. The man pauses on his threshold to remember a dog he tortured with a firecracker twenty years prior. Guilt makes its own punishment: the woman buys ribbons for the children she encounters at the park, but they run from her, screaming; the man nurses a scrapyard mutt with rice and milk, wiping the stained mange around its mouth and crouching down to try to catch some expression in its eyes. But guilt is not a logical thing, a series of weights to balance. It is a carousel, hand-carved with all the choices its uneasy rider could have made. Here he insists they walk; here he checks the brake; here he sends their mother in place of the nurse; here he sends himself. The golden rings slip from his hands. He will reach for them forever.

  Étienne had tried to bring some color into the children’s cheeks with a chalky rouge that made them look as if they had perished in a circus accident. He was compensating for the unnatural color by rouging their arms and legs until Paris made him stop and wipe it all off. Étienne complained that the children looked far too dead, which was fair enough.

  Isadora would surely complain later that there wasn’t enough emotion at the service. There had been far too much for Paris, though; it seemed to him as if everyone were weeping, from the ushers handing out programs at the door to the drunks those ushers cleared off the burial monuments before the Mass began. Everyone in attendance held a handkerchief to their eyes. The chamber strings wept as they played “Death of Ase.” The tears fell on their instruments and charted milky paths through rosin dust to well at their wooden lips.

  There was some trouble with the fire downstairs, where Isadora had insisted on being left alone. Upstairs, Paris made a studious effort to pray as the bulk of the crowd greeted the family and left. He chose a neglected corner of the chapel. On the other side of the room, a pair of attendants started sweeping the floor. Finding he had nothing much to say, Paris picked himself up and went outside.

  Elizabeth and Max shook the last of the hands as Raymond shuffled around in his robes like a dimwitted priest. Most of the guests had already left, along with Gus, for the bar. One of the few remaining carried a flask from the night prior, which he offered around. Paris drank and washed it across his gums. It was flat champagne, and warm.

  He found himself looking to the horizon, in the general direction of Florida. He thought of his wife, Lillie, who kept a small house near the ocean and was raising their children there. He wondered if she still thought of herself as his wife; surely so, with a reminder of him at the end of her name and four more at her table. At that moment his girls were likely reading in the sunroom, having just gotten up and ready for the day. He found himself wondering why he left his old life, considering all that leaving had gotten him.

  After the children are taken away, Isadora addresses the residents of the crematory hall

  Damned ghosts! Only the living can know me. You wailing mothers and widowing men, moaning about like children, playing at sadness as if you can even recall it. You hazy physicians can’t harm me any longer, you snake-oil spirits. You would lock me in a white-walled cell, but you have no weight to throw against me, do you! I will bind and curse you, and torture you with a lesson you can never learn. Only try to move your arms to greet me!

  The baby stretching to take the world delivers a performance to which the rest of us can only aspire. Watch in wonder at a baby freshly born. Our book of natural movement has been buried so deep within us that its pages have become general, merging ten into one, those first perfect movements fading into the story of our first words.

  Simply stretch! You could pay good money to learn this simple pose, but no amount will buy you ease. Your fear builds a thick foundation, and when you try to stretch, your solar plexus makes a fist in the core of your body as shoulders and throat seize above as if hung from far-strung wires.

  Every gesture of surrender is built from control! At shoulder level, raise forearms, hands extended gently from the wrists. Taper the movement in each hand like a conductor drawing a phrase to its end between forefinger and thumb. The movement fails you! The disease of twitching logic ruined your hands the day you learned to write your own name. A curse of cursive! Your own mind drags you into its ruin and locks you there for life! Only death releases you from the prison you built yourself, and now look at you, wishing only to stretch.

  Goodbye, dull spirits! Practice three times daily and you might begin to feel it. If you can will magic for me in exchange, I beg only one thing: that in the moment the water was pressing in on all sides, their fear was gone, and all that remained was the sound of their own heartbeats thumping in their ears, my babies knew once more the comfort of the womb, the ease of being carried through the world.

  The ride home is delayed by an accident between a tram and a horse

  The horse laid out on the pavement was draped in flowers. Its rider, picking himself off the sidewalk, was also formally dressed, and declared to passers-by that he had just come from a wedding and had lost his hat. Weddings bothered Elizabeth. The false finality troubled her, the optimism of death parting a pair who would more likely be destroyed by boredom. Funerals, on the other hand, were always a strange comfort. At least they delivered on the eternity they advertised.

  Raymond had arrived after the service began, strolling into the memorial hall in his tunic and sandals like a drunken Aristotle. He and Elizabeth never had much to say to each other, rather preferring to level a mutual judgment that satisfied them both. The service was uneventful, sweet even, with a charming small chamber group. Isadora made them all wait for the cremation, and the family obliged as even the most stalwart guests and most of the press went home. When Isadora came back up from the columbarium, she saw Raymond at once and threw her arms around him. He always was her favorite. His late arrival forgotten, he seemed happy enough to leave with his sisters while the men sorted out the last of it. Max stayed behind as well.

  Isadora claimed that she wanted to have something to eat, but when she got into the car, she lay down on Elizabeth’s lap and fell asleep.

  “The service,” Raymond said.

  “It was lovely,” Elizabeth said, “so lovely.”

  It had been lovely enough. She had found a guestbook at last and taken it out to the gate for the reporters to comb through, aiding them wi
th the spelling of names. One of them had asked if the grieving mother had danced during the service, and Elizabeth delivered a withering glare that was apparently interpreted as a confirmation; people worked hard to support the ideas they already believed. They were hungry for examples of Isadora’s callousness, but Elizabeth hadn’t suffered that callousness in silence her whole life just to give it away.

  “So lovely,” Raymond said, as if he had been there to see it. “It was just what they would have liked, the poor babes.”

  It was a bizarre supposition, and Elizabeth disagreed sincerely that the children would have liked one second of the funeral, but she didn’t want to start a quarrel. Instead, she stroked their sister’s unwashed hair, finding an ornamental comb that must have been placed in there days before.

  It was impossible to know what the next year would bring. There was the question of Isadora’s touring schedule, which Elizabeth immediately felt low for even considering; of course it would be scrapped, and any upcoming seminars and lectures as well. Singer was sending them both to Greece, and Elizabeth was happy to go, knowing what it would mean for Isadora and anyway needing a vacation herself. Max could return to Darmstadt and manage for a few weeks without doing too much permanent harm, and Paris would support them all financially in the venture so long as Isadora didn’t cross him in an actionable way.

  The accident on the street had drawn a crowd. Men were running up to help the passengers of the tram, which had partially tipped and was leaning dangerously against the curb. The man with the horse was asking if anyone had seen his hat. The poor horse might have broken its front legs, though it was hard to tell from a distance. Elizabeth missed the old carriages, with shades that could be drawn over their windows; trapped behind the accident in the backseat of the touring car, she felt like the grand marshal of a sadistic parade.

  In Elizabeth’s lap, Isadora snored. Last year, she started including press clippings in their recent letters, letting them speak for her; the critics were astounded by her latest work, dances that seemed extemporaneous but which reviewers witnessed her execute again and again, every performance flawless, her students frantically notating in the wings. The social reporters tried to turn the public focus to minor scandals, such as Raymond wearing his toga on the streets of New York, but nobody among the Arts pages could ignore the fact that she was doing the best work of her life. This was a key moment in Isadora’s career, which made it a key moment for them all. And now every venture, every lesson, every curtain would need necessarily to pause.

  “And with good reason,” Elizabeth said. Raymond startled but didn’t respond.

  Through the front window they could see the horse’s legs jutting up from the street.

  “Looks bad,” Raymond said.

  “How is Penelope?”

  He gave a dolorous shrug. “How are any of us?”

  “You don’t have to be so dramatic.”

  He turned to her, and she saw that his eyes were red-rimmed and sunken. “The children are dead,” he said, his voice ragged. “They’re dead.”

  “But your wife is still alive,” she insisted. “We are still alive.” She wanted to say more but stopped herself. It was impossible to reason with any of them. Everyone wanted this crisis to bring life to a halt, to stop the Earth from turning while they found some sense in sunlight, but Elizabeth knew better. Understanding the road that lay before them wouldn’t make it any easier to walk. They were obliged to take one step and another, stumbling over themselves as the larger dance was revealed.

  On the Greek island of Corfu, the craggy jewel of the Ionian Sea and a favorite of Kaiser Wilhelm, who used his holidays there to pursue amateur archaeology

  Clouds upon clouds. The quality of air by the sea suggests some process by which the whole of the atmosphere is scrubbed, wrung out, and hung up again. Endless layers of fresh-washed clouds press upon one another, each of them as thin as a veil over a woman’s body, over her face.

  Corfu bears a steady flow of visitors on holiday, and a few sailing skiffs lashed to the low port welcome the daily ferry. It’s quieter out of town and nearly catatonic on the farther beaches, where locals claim the rocky grottoes and lay planks to span the rocks like fingers on an ancient hand.

  Elizabeth walks with me, the two of us arm in arm like old friends. She holds the jar of ashes I gave her and limps along sad-eyed, so kind to take a leave of absence for a grand adventure with her darling sister, whom she loves very much, clearly.

  Yesterday we made a slow tour through the market and bought yards on yards of rose-colored silk. I paid the vendor before she had a chance to bargain, and she was cross with me for the rest of the day and said I only hate money because I have lately been spoiled. The silk was worth the fight, and we both wear lengths of it wrapped around us today, bound up by cords I found in the armoire. It drags along behind as we shuffle along the sandy path toward a promised scenic view, obedient to our guide.

  Elizabeth requires some help as we go, ever unsteady on her bad leg and faking it just a little for sympathy, less than she used to. She plucks my hand off the raw place inside my elbow where I’ve been scratching. Pressing the spot with her fingertips, she comes away with a bit of blood on her fingertips, which she wipes on her own forearm.

  It wouldn’t do to stay in France, so Gus and Elizabeth gathered me up like our old days on the road. Memories! Our world was cradled in the pocket of a slingshot drawing back, and anything would send us flying.

  In Greece we crawl like sullen ants. Elizabeth hopes we will soon return to normal, as if life can pause and begin again, a singer who lifts his hand to stop the music while he clears his throat. And so we make these convalescent motions by the sea.

  Our old guide farmed this land and knows it. The path switchbacks endlessly up a steep hill, ridges jutting out where he grew kumquats and olives and some grapes. The path is edged with white stones the size of a woman’s kneecaps floating in bathwater. His working days came to an end when an accident inspired his children to intervene, and now he sells a walking tour twice a week to tourists, promising some ancient artifacts along the way.

  He introduced himself in Greek and Italian but insisted on English for us, though it is unclear if his knowledge of the language extends beyond the script or even if it includes the words he speaks at all.

  During every pause in our walk, he launches into his speech, stretching in two directions to hold his wooden walking sticks, which he hangs between like the flag of an economically depressed nation strung up on a windless day. “The white cliffs cut a dra-matic sil-houette along the shore-line,” he says. “Simple to see the an-chor point ’fore the pier, har-bor to Ulysses, har-bor to Glad-stone.” Each word lines up like an officer for inspection, remarkable in their uniformity from one to the next. It’s possible he worked out the way the words fit together, by sound, memorizing them without knowing their meaning. His syllables emerge unnaturally fused, like babies conjoined at the skull.

  He faces the sea: “The cliffs take their white co-lor from sand and stone which com-prise. One may see the gods them-selves to take a sun-shine trip on this path.” The wind carries his words past us and over the rocky crag separating us from the water.

  “Fruit and flo-wer abound on our kind isle.” He spits onto a wall of stones that restrain a fat olive tree from falling four stories to the sea below. The three others in our touring party—gentlemen in spotless jodhpurs—list behind, throwing pebbles and pointing at times at the hills. A viewer from afar might assume they were watching a funeral march, an old man escorted to the next world by two draped angels with his faithful sons trailing behind.

  Things would have been livelier with Gus, but his preparations for the day took too long, and we had to leave him at the hotel. He has always been a deliberate man and careful with his things, taking hours to line up his morning supplies, inspecting the brushes and blades. Every picture of Gus features him cleaning his glasses. When he was a child, he scrubbed his wooden toys with a
rag until he ruined the paint and was punished. It’s better to leave him to his own devices as the rest of us go on with our lives.

  The cliffrise extends a few hundred feet above the audible mess of foam and fish dashing against stone. It is a churning machine, an endless sound, soothing only in how it consumes all other sounds, inspiring a pleasant hypnosis; the sirens calling from their rocks may well have been the rocks themselves.

  Sister says we’re almost there, clapping in a manner meant to be encouraging. We’ve fallen behind the guide, who went on fifty paces before realizing our distance and now waits for us, his head lowered against the wind. The walk is pitiful work, but at last the path comes to an end at the cliff’s edge.

  Between us and the sea, a huge white stone in the shape of a horseshoe extends a few meters out, curving gently into blue sky. The width allows one person at a time to walk single file and observe the view. Sand and softer stone must have once held it tighter to the ridge, but heavy rains have washed it all away to reveal the promontory arch. Around the perimeter, a slack chain swings daintily between three upright posts. The flat sea stretches out before us, a banquet table cleared of its plates under a wash of electric light.

  From a deep pocket in his vest, the guide produces an orange. “Please step to the rail, be a guest to my land, ob-serve the earth’s boun-ty,” he says, carving a thick rind of flesh with his thumbnail and flicking it off the cliff’s edge, examining his thumb and then the fruit before splitting off a wedge and popping it into his mouth. “Miss,” he says, addressing the both of us together.