Isadora

by Amelia Gray

  Elizabeth, on her journey home to Darmstadt, notices the particular pleasure of factory air

  Rather she recalled it, having been away so long. It smelled of freshly lit matches and steady work, and the haze drifting up from the smokestacks dropped a glittering summer snow, metal dust from grinding lathes. She breathed in as deeply as she could bear and felt it sharply in her lungs, scrubbing away the salt grime she had accrued by the sea. A fellow sitting beside her on the train remarked that the steelworks heated the ground so well that beautiful foliage grew all year long. They had Progress to thank for this, and she was well and truly grateful.

  From her seat in the train’s open car she could lean out and wave to men and women constitutioning at the tree line. Germany was so strong and steady. In New York, it seemed the moment anything was built, it would burn to the ground and they had to start again, and everyone tried to be optimistic about it as they filled another set of walls with crumpled newspaper. The proud old cities of Europe gave her a sense of peace and permanence, where bridges arched protectively over the same roads they had spanned for centuries. Max once told her of a book that predicted events nearly one thousand years into the future, but whenever she tried to picture the world he described, she pictured the gyroscopic whirligigs and motored tollways elevated one meter from the ground so as not to disturb the old familiar scene below.

  She recalled the humiliating voyage she had made back to Europe after the failure of her makeshift school in New York. That damned city could burn for all she cared. Isadora promised to set her up properly in Germany, so she returned with her tail between her legs. But once the disappointment wore off, she came to appreciate her home in Darmstadt. Max was her first employee, and together they broadened the curriculum offering and began to build the business.

  Elizabeth was heartened by her little solo trips, on which she felt an attitude of curiosity and pleasure her sister seemed to experience all the time. Isadora never questioned the tide, even if it was pulling her out to sea.

  It wasn’t so long ago that they were leotarded in pinks, learning ballet from Mother. Elizabeth was still young enough that her feet aligned and behaved on the same orders, a crisp fifth croisé to a lovely dégagé effacé devant. She moved through her stations while Isadora leapt like a stotting fawn through a brisé and back to fifth, landing with a perfect give in the knees, the look on her face matching the ease with which she expressed the posture. Contact the floor, Mother called, stomping time. Isadora yawned, hitting her marks.

  Ballet would soon become as useless to them as Elizabeth’s left leg, the connective tissue crumbling from hip to ankle like a rubber hose left in the sun. But she remembered those few sessions where they were equally elastic in body and mind, cushioned by the promise of their mutual success. She wondered if Isadora ever thought of it.

  They say the other senses grow stronger on the loss of one. As her leg seized and stiffened, Elizabeth found herself becoming the most emotionally limber of the family—happy to teach six days in a row or to sleep on a pallet by the drafty wall—all so they might attend Isadora’s greatness in London and Paris, supporting her as she went on to Constantinople. All Elizabeth knew of Turkey came from a photograph she had seen once of a fig market in Smyrna, the men in vests and fezzes. She dozed the rest of the way home, dreaming of postcard albums of foreign lands.

  On landing late in Constantinople, Isadora and Penelope encounter a stranger who presents a challenge

  At first the woman on the dock seems a statue or a spirit, gloved and veiled in black, draped in it, boots as black as the planks and drawing dark from her legs. The long black veil rests heavy over her face, coming well below her shoulders. I am a bride walking down the aisle to meet my own shadow.

  She makes no move when the short plank is laid, banging so close beside her it could have caught her toe. A man emerges from the customhouse and guides her gently by both shoulders as he would move a sleepwalker, taking her place to greet the yawning travelers. The hour is long past midnight, the empty streets a cold welcome though it’s still warm enough to melt a ghost.

  My waist feels spiraled by a dry vine as I cross the bucking plank, which shrugs and sways buoyant under my feet; sadly, it seems the time has come for me to envy a plank.

  The woman and I stand shoulder to shoulder as a silent welcome party, ignored by all. Penelope has found a veil to wear and hands me one when she disembarks but doesn’t offer to help me pin it, going to talk to the customs man as I drape it inelegantly over my hair. It falls immediately into my eyes and I spend a while fussing with it before pulling it back to rest limp as a doily on my forehead.

  Leaning to the side, I tap the veiled woman’s arm. “Do I look like a sitting room sofa?” I ask. “Be honest with me, spare no kindness.”

  The woman’s veil wavers. “A little,” she says. “Did you meet my son on your crossing?”

  I’m grateful she speaks English, saving us Penelope’s smug translation.

  “Unless your son was the ship’s mate, there were no other young men.”

  “He is on the manifest. This ship has arrived from Sarandë at midnight on the last Friday of the month for ten years now, sometimes delayed by duties in the bay but regular in port, and he is arriving with the ship.”

  Penelope directs our trunks toward a car and lights a cigarette, cinching her long jacket against the heat as she stands away from the departing group, looking very foreign overall. She accepts everyone’s well wishes with a humiliated wave.

  “He is soon arriving,” the veiled woman insists.

  “There were no other young men,” I say. “My companion is bashful. We only met a couple honeymooning from New York, an adventuring man who had never been to Constantinople and whose mother lived in Nanterre, a young mother and her child, and one older woman who declined our dinner invitation and may actually have quietly died after that, come to think, for we haven’t seen her since.”

  It is that moment a handsome young man disembarks and comes to kiss his mother, unaware that he has the dark arts wholly to thank for his appearance.

  “Raoul,” she says without a bit of the relief I would feel in her place. “This kind lady kept me company just now while I was waiting. She says she did not meet you.”

  He does seem kin to a veil, with fine pale features framed by his black hair, his mother’s smile lined with sadness. He holds what looks at first to be a striped card or a swatch of felt. On closer look, it is a single epaulet, which he hands to his mother. She holds it to her lips.

  The man smiles grandly at me. “I heard you were aboard with the vomiting woman,” he says, fixing his mother’s veil where it mussed in their embrace. “This is a famous dancer, Mother.”

  “We should meet again,” she murmurs, fondling the epaulet. “I would very much like to host a famous dancer in my home at any time.” Her son offers his arm, and she takes it, leaning on him as they go.

  How quickly the three of us have become Son, Mother, and Dancer, as clear as a call sheet. I find myself hating this woman, who held her vigil and was rewarded, so thoughtless in her luck and so ignorant of it. The two of them walk to the end of the road, looking about expectantly, as if love is a feast they’ve come to expect and a maître d’ will shortly lead them to their table. There they go, arm in arm, hardly even hungry for all they get to enjoy.

  A memory of Milan’s old city in November 1909, a season plagued by a demoralizing amount of rain

  Paris and I played a pretty Milanese family, and soon enough I was carrying his child.

  I gave him the news once dinner arrived at his favorite table at his very favorite restaurant, in a district of family homes where talk above a whisper earned a thin glare. The owners didn’t think much of me but had been so honored by the presence of Paris Singer that season that they engraved a brass plaque bearing his name and mounted it near the door. He was cutting into a jewel of fatty squab as I told him about the pregnancy and how I hoped to be rid of it by the end
of the week.

  He received my news in silence, his knife slowing to a stop. The squab was encased in a revoltingly sweet apricot gelée, which I detected from my side of the table, senses being keener at the time, and I was nearly sick right there as he speared a bite and brought it to his mouth. Indeed he always seemed the most thoughtful while chewing, as if a problem could be crushed in his jaw and absorbed over the course of some hours, its solution revealed the next morning in the toilet.

  “It has already destroyed my balance,” I said, gazing over his shoulder to avoid looking directly at the squab. The mounting sense of a second solar plexus had been building for weeks, thin as a matchstick but present and glowing. With Deirdre, Ted and I had felt nothing but love and anticipation, picturing a springtime child draped in roses. The idea alone had been more than enough to forgive the interruption to my work, and Teddy was beside himself with joy. Every night he would hold me and weep so inconsolably that I thought he had gone truly unhinged.

  Paris was an older man and more practical. He had his wife and four school-aged children sunning themselves on the lawn of some bungalow in Miami. I thought of them only when I thought of any kind of future with Paris, which I rarely did; why trouble yourself with tomorrow when today is troubling enough? This new development had made me think of them, and I didn’t care for it.

  “You want to let the air in?” he asked, still chewing.

  “I’m not certain what you mean.”

  He made a scooping motion at his trouser line, using the side of his fork as if there were anything he might excavate other than red wine and small birds. “The air,” he said.

  “You mean, you wonder if I might hire a midwife to open me up with a device, swab the area with a rag dipped in alcohol, puncture me with a bulb, and remove the affecting fluid and tissue?”

  “That does remove some nuance.” He took down the rest of his wine and called for another bottle.

  “I can’t imagine the woman performing it possesses any brilliant insight.”

  “And she’s lucky, or else you would have to oversee every one.” He set down his fork. “You know, my mother had ten children by the time she was your age.”

  “You’re almost halfway there already, without my help.”

  “We were the joy of her life.”

  “And you don’t seem to miss yours much.”

  “I don’t have them wilding across Europe,” he said, that old wolfish smile creeping around the edge of his mouth. I hate it when he smiles at me. “They are with Lillie, where they’re safe.”

  “Safety! I was wondering what she offered, but that does make sense. What a good woman she is.” Men resent nothing more than their own comfort and hate the women in their lives who offer it. They want safety from their wives and danger from other women, without realizing that all women risk mortal danger from strangers and live their lives holding that damage at arm’s length, a cup that must never spill on the men they love, who meanwhile hate them for their feigned nature. This motherhood situation is even darker, as the mother grows in her body the architect of her own end; the child who doesn’t kill her in childbirth will break her heart later on. Men have to manufacture this kind of danger, which comes so relentlessly to women.

  “You could learn a thing or two from her goodness,” he says, spearing a potato.

  Paris had been racing cars by the aqueduct all day while I was at the doctor, dealing with one of life’s more ordinary threats. Now he wants me to learn from good Lillie Singer, at her window with a book.

  The waiter arrived and immediately retreated, bowing as if one of us had produced a small-caliber pistol and shot him in the stomach.

  “You leave your students with your sister when you’re tired of them,” Paris continued, baring his teeth, “and it’s better than how you treat your own daughter. You’ll have Deirdre shilling before she learns to write. Put her in rags so she can play the beggar before she has to take on the role in earnest.”

  “You should be well pleased to escape me,” I said. “Since you so clearly understand the dimensions of my failure.”

  He looked at his palms as if they could tell him the quickest route back to the hotel. A strange calm came over us both, in the charmed way it sometimes did when we tired of the argument at the exact same time.

  “You contain within your quarreling frame a perfect machine,” he said. “Come now, let’s go.”

  He left enough extra for the waiter to afford psychological attention and we walked in silence all the way to the room, past the unfamiliar lift attendant who greeted us in English, clapping Paris on the shoulder as if he were a friend to whom money was owed.

  In the room, we found the flowers had been changed, the empty bottles taken away. The curtains had been drawn to reveal the piazza, quiet aside from a drunk on a bicycle.

  “I only wanted you to tell me to keep it,” I said.

  The man on the bicycle bumped along, weaving through the cobblestone. He faltered and dipped the front wheel into a rut, jamming it to a sudden stop. Tossed over the handlebars, he fell in a heap under a lightpost. We watched him struggle and go still.

  It was cold in the room, colder than the street, where people had come to gather around the man. Paris brought me a blanket while the chambermaid lit the fire and showed herself out so silently I worried that she had flown up the chimney. The blanket covered me from shoulders to floor, curtaining around my feet to hold the air, the material as thick and rich as redwood bark. Outside, a pair of officers strolled up to the group gathered around the drunk, who was bracing himself to stand, bravely fighting the confoundation of a tilting planet.

  Paris dropped to both knees, looping his arm around me to press his ear to my stomach. It was a pleasurable sight, the great man on his knees. We would not speak again of the procedure. In that way, the decision was made.

  If only we could have stayed there forever, at the hotel window in Milan. The cyclist would melt into a pile of gears and brakes under the altar of our room, one room in a long line of rooms, heir to the next—I was bursting into fortune at last to find it was just another room—but this was the first moment I gazed into the future without an ounce of dread. The room should have been preserved as a monument and kept away from the public, and in the silence of days and months my body would swell to produce a child and he would be called Patrick, after nobody, and the three of us would remain forever there, looking out on the changing days. We would keep completely still, if stillness would keep us safe.

  Putting off work in Darmstadt, Elizabeth sets to composing a letter to Romano in her mind

  My Romano—she began, and then scratched, as he ought not get the idea that she was taking liberties with the idea of courtship. He would send her a five-page letter addressing the point that no person could own another, and it would be the last she ever heard from him.

  * * *

  Romano was scratched for formality.

  * * *

  RR scratched for its locomotive aspect, though it was pleasant to think of the man carrying her merrily from one station of her life to the next. It had been a two-week affair, she reminded herself, plucking her own hand from the monument she had been building to their love.

  * * *

  R would have to suffice, suggesting enough familiarity and mystery both to intrigue him. The greeting sorted, she could relax a little. The next few paragraphs would obviously need to describe the weather.

  * * *

  R—Do you remember our breakfasts out on the balcony? It was sunny and warm each time, with a slight fog and you so handsome across the table. There was coffee and endless bowls of fruit, and we ate like children, whatever was brought to us. I think of it often.

  The weather here is fair, warm by the middle of the day. I realized you might like to picture my life in Darmstadt, and so first you must imagine my bedroom, with its slim single bed. Waking at dawn, I meet Max for tea, and we talk generally of the day. He’s a good man and has these aspirations. I forge
t how simple aspirations are to come by, how free for anyone to alight upon. When I look at him, I feel like a child paddling around a raft.

  But I was telling you of my day. After morning tea it’s off to rehearsal. The girls have an affection for me, greeting me as Tante Miss as they line up against the wall to do their exercises. There’s no barre, none of us having much use for it, though there are still plenty of mirrors for them to look themselves over and for Tante Miss to admire her profile as well. I’ve determined my left cheek is finer, though you might disagree, having seated yourself often to my right.

  You might also like to imagine the view from our little studio, which looks over all of Darmstadt, its low, rolling clouds and an ocean of trees under which you might see a few people of the town walking or riding horses. We like our old-fashioned things here.

  The girls are well acquainted with my drills delivered from the mirrored wall, against which I have lately begun to lean; the pain in my hip bothers me and saps my humor. I’m harder on them when I’m in pain. On those days, I make them run their drills until they cry out every time their bruising feet strike the floor, until they collapse and weep and then hobble out for a late breakfast.

  We are considering costumes for a Summer Solstice performance, to which you are invited if you’re interested. The pianist and I will dress as Theia and Eos. Even Max is being playful, though not much. I hope you are well—Elizabeth.

  * * *

  cut expansive references to weather—cut fussy & familiar allusions—reduce formality—add mention of light & its uses—cut reference to M—cut assumptions regarding imagination—add suggestion of desire—add joking &/or teasing element—add element of seduction &/or interest—cut allusions to age/infirmity—add playful element—add greater interest in sundry artistic aims—

  * * *

  R—Hoping you’re well from across the way and thought you might like to know about the scene here. It’s warm all right but there’s a soft morning light that filters through the leaves and comes to rest around the entire school, giving us all a glow that seems internal and everlasting.