Isadora

by Amelia Gray

  “Your home is beautiful,” Penelope says.

  Ilgın looks around at the thin upholstered chairs, brought years ago from her family home, chosen over her mother’s dappled kidskin couches, which were destroyed by her sister’s cats within a month of the funeral.

  “I hope you are enjoying your time in Pera,” she says. “There are a number of fine shops and cafés if you take the time to explore, many Christian houses of worship and synagogues in the neighborhood, and you can find French and German shops.” She says all this to my hair, which bobs my chin in a truncated wave.

  Penelope asks her something in Turkish, but Ilgın looks at me and frowns until she asks again, in English: “What was this place before you lived here?”

  “It was a private residence also before,” she says. “Before that, I am told it was a shop selling materials for the purpose of horses.”

  “What was it before that?” I ask.

  “Farmland, I believe.”

  “And before that?”

  “All right,” Penelope says.

  “Water under the bridge,” Ilgın says with a thin smile. “The reason I came to call on you is that I wanted to ask for your help. For you see, my son is gone, and I fear he will follow his brothers.”

  It takes a moment to register—the mind tapping a pen absently on the marble as it waits—but yes, the man Raoul, her son beside her on the dock. “With the epaulet,” I say to Penelope, who glares at me in a way that suggests she has either already come to this conclusion or didn’t want to.

  Ilgın gazes up at a painting of either the Amstel or the Rhine, hard to say, there is a windmill.

  “Where did his brothers go?” I ask.

  “They went to death,” she says. “I buried them both last week.”

  Behind her winds a placid tributary of the Nile, down which Moses as an infant floated in a basket. It is presented in a burnished black frame, the river looking thick and sodden. Wouldn’t Moses’s mother have been worried about the basket staying afloat, given the integrity of the reeds which comprised it? Perhaps she secretly wanted to drown him so she could go live her own life, but didn’t have the courage to hold him under and so sent him floating away.

  “How terrible,” I say.

  Penelope looks at me curiously, but it’s impossible to explain this line of thinking. It’s something she will learn in time; her own helplessness is only months from being revealed, the feeling of living with a second beating heart outside her body, a thin ribcage the only protection against the perilous world.

  “Was there an accident?” Penelope asks Ilgın.

  “They died by their own hand,” she says, expressing as much and as little as possible in a manner designed to deflect further questions. Penelope frowns but keeps quiet, picturing the ropes and knives.

  “Raoul will have gone to Ayastefanos,” the older woman says. “To our old house. He said he wanted to be alone. I tried to save his brothers, but I failed. An oracle said I brought a spiritual illness upon them. Their ghosts hold me back from Raoul.”

  “Oracles will tell you anything at all,” I say.

  “Not this one,” she says firmly. “The house is set close to the water. Tell the ferryman my name.”

  “You want us to go after him?” Penelope asks. “Madam, neither of us are in the proper condition—”

  The current takes the mother’s second-best basket, catching for a moment on a low branch and half tipping before righting itself and bobbing nearly out of sight. The mother watches, holding her breath.

  “He spoke of you all the way home and again in the morning before he left,” Ilgın says, reaching for me. Her hands are cold and feel full of loose material, as if they hold the disjointed bones of her sons as well. “He despised himself for not making your acquaintance. There was something he wanted to tell you, and he feels he lost the chance.”

  “You see,” Penelope says, leaning forward to physically insert herself into the conversation. “We would very much like to go, but you must understand, I am experiencing a difficult pregnancy, and Isadora not three months ago has—”

  “I’ll go,” I say, and Penelope’s sputtering only steels my resolve. “I will leave straightaway.”

  Ilgın nods once, as if my choice was foretold.

  “May we have the name of your oracle?” Penelope asks at last.

  Max spends the afternoon looking for a woman who has been doing her best to avoid him

  He was in a charming mood, which was wasted on the students. Remembering Elizabeth’s exhortation that they discover themselves more truly, he went off in search of the piano teacher. She wasn’t sitting behind any of the pianos in the building, not the good piano in the recital hall or the comfortable ones in any of the rehearsal rooms. This confused him, and he nearly called the whole thing off, when at last he found her on the porch with her sewing kit, a child’s costume draped over her lap.

  “Frau Venneberg,” he said, bowing slightly.

  Trella gave him an expressionless glance, moved her kit from the bench beside her, and went back to mending.

  Taking a seat, Max stretched one leg and then the other. The porch looked over a moderate fenced-in garden and a quiet side street beyond, which saw only the occasional young mothers walking with their babies. Most of the children seemed to prefer the tree-lined path behind the school, and the older women tended to stay indoors, scrubbing various low corners and doing the wash. On that particular morning the only movement was that of the leaves of the young oaks and a little girl crouched on the ground, organizing a line of acorns along the fence.

  “She has been out there for an hour,” Trella said, “preparing for the parade of forest queens. Now you must stay and watch.”

  “I’m not obliged, she hasn’t seen me yet.”

  “She expressly asked me to retain any guests who arrive in advance.” Her words might have been mistaken as a flirtatious advance, but Trella delivered them in a serious way that made it clear she was only following orders.

  The costume she was mending was from their solstice recital. He remembered the moment during the reception—the girls running wild after too many cakes—when one of them caught her foot up in another’s long skirt and tore a long strip from her golden veil. Both girls wept over the garment and had to be individually consoled. They seemed to be always falling; perhaps they could add some instruction on how ladies might more carefully walk. He remembered Trella promising them both that she would mend the veil better than new. And now here she was, true to her word, making careful stitches in thread she had found to match the fabric. She would someday become the type of mother who would devote endless affection to her children, gathering them up all day and crouching by their little beds at night to catch the scent of their sleeping breath, emerging with a sighing smile before delivering one chaste kiss to her husband before bed. Max thought of the relief that husband would feel at this reception, the ease of becoming a pleasantly mundane constant, with a woman looking at him the same way as she would a dog or a particularly useful shelf, reserving her praise and scorn for others.

  Trella was watching the girl, who had brushed the dirt from her hands and moved into position in the center of the sidewalk. The girl saluted up at them, and Max lifted his hand in return.

  “I hear you are not pleased with my improvements to your course,” he said to Trella.

  The girl in the street began spinning in place, making the occasional tremulous pause to ensure they were both still watching.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Trella said.

  “Elizabeth tells me you mentioned it.”

  The girl threw an imaginary baton into the air and executed a series of spins and slight kicks while it floated, weightless, outside the narrow scope of her imagination.

  “I didn’t think she would tell you,” she said. “I wish she hadn’t.”

  He appreciated her tone, which he took as an apology. “It would help me work more efficiently with your concerns if you e
xpressed them directly to me,” he said. He would remember later that she had in fact spoken to him, had brought it up after dinner one day. But it was important to keep the idea constant, and he was glad he didn’t remember this when he was correcting her, as the point stood.

  “I will remind you that in the absence of the Frauen Duncan, I am your superior,” he said. “I’m looking forward to working together to bring the most adequate education possible to the young ladies of the Elizabeth Duncan School.”

  “Of course,” she said, adjusting her gloves.

  Max was disappointed in himself, ashamed that his attempt at seduction had turned so quickly to discipline. Wasn’t that always the way! He hadn’t taken Elizabeth’s request seriously when she first made it, assuming it was the old subtle competitive sense that roared up whenever Isadora was involved, but now that Elizabeth was home, she was locking herself up in her room at night, and Max was forced to confront the idea that she had taken a lover. He tried to remind himself of the freedom this gave him, but the feeling was quickly subsumed by the dread of its undertaking. Here he was, forced to learn an art he had never bothered to study when it was most relevant, and now he was failing the tests.

  He wasn’t even cross with Trella, not really. It was Elizabeth driving his concern, her meddling that had inserted herself into his relationship with the young pianist. Every night he dreamed of a heroic class of women bearing the banner of the new age across their breast, each of them beaming. He was so close to making this dream a reality. If these two had their way, however, the next generation would come to inherit the very brand of weakness they themselves had suffered all their lives.

  But he couldn’t think like that. The women would eventually find his ideas to be right for the course of the school and very fashionable with new trends. Soon enough, they would all thank him.

  The girl in the road had transformed from marionette to bandleader. He watched her conducting the birds.

  “Tell me of your family,” Max said.

  Trella shook her head once. She kept one gloved hand pressed to the costume in her lap as if it were gauze over a fresh wound.

  “Come now, don’t be obstinate. My theories are meant to only benefit our students. They are standing at a real turning point of human civilization, with the opportunity to take the most modern course. If you would take a moment to consider the potential—”

  “I live with my father south of the city,” she said. “He worked as a prison guard until he was injured and couldn’t work. My older sisters live in Berlin with their husbands. Our mother died when we were very young.”

  “Fatherhood is a precarious thing,” Max said vaguely, though he didn’t believe it. Fatherhood actually seemed fairly straightforward. He thought of his own father, who stocked his grocery in keeping with kosher law, with the exception of a daily tray of cheese bourekas, which were so unpopular in Vienna it was a mystery why he kept ordering them. He was a stubborn man and unadaptive to change, and he was not well liked by his customers. Fortunately, of all the lessons he learned from his parents, his mother’s uncompromising vision was the most salient.

  Trella didn’t respond. The girl on the street had become a dancing bear, waving her paws in an inarticulate way. It was important for children to have an early sense of fantasy. Perhaps they could incorporate some element of imaginative activity into the curriculum. The women might be happier with the strength course if the children completed it tumbling like circus acrobats, and the girls’ roles could be assigned in a way that challenged their weakness.

  Max hated feeling beholden to the women. He worked so tirelessly for their success, and they fought him at every turn.

  He stood so quickly the bench rocked back, startling her. “You will appreciate my changes to the school or seek your employment elsewhere,” he said.

  Trella tipped her head to one side. “Yes,” she said, only slightly narrowing her eyes to his back as he walked away. She had been enjoying the morning alone with her thoughts before Max arrived. Once he was gone again, she found herself thinking of her family. She returned to her favorite of the four precious memories that remained of her mother, the one when they were making nut breads for the Advent and shaped a small cake—a secret cake, unknown to the others—which they topped with thin-sliced apricots. Mother served a slice to Trella, her youngest, the one who seemed so disappointed in the world, even as a child.

  Upstairs, Elizabeth works herself into a minor frenzy by considering the artistic eye

  If a dancer’s whole body is her instrument, Elizabeth figured the sculptor’s instrument is more potent, distilled as it is into the hands. Romano had lovely thin hands, but the rest of him was an inarticulate afterthought—a pouch of fat behind his knees, rings so deep under his eyes they could be mistaken for a pair of subtle bruises. His hands were as soft as powder, discerning in their function, scrubbed palms cool to the touch, every nail trimmed to a gentle half-moon. She felt the inquiry in his hands, when he pressed her hip to find the bone.

  Elizabeth examined her own hands, pink and swollen with the heat of the afternoon. The girls had lost interest in the school’s little courtyard when the weather had gotten too warm, and so she had it to herself and could spend the entire morning out there, half-reading the paper and sweating under her light dress. She found that if she circled the small space three times while envisioning the perimeter of a desert island, she could usually generate enough luck for everyone to leave her alone most of the morning.

  The social columns included a number of birth announcements, which gave her the chance to think of Romano as an infant. She imagined herself as his mother, stroking his chubby legs and making wishes for his future. Motherhood for Elizabeth seemed imbued with mystic properties that alternately frightened and fascinated her. She didn’t understand children, save for their mercurial nature, which she envied more than anything. Once, one of her students shoved another into a doorframe, bloodying the younger one’s nose, but it was the older girl who was inconsolable long after the injured one lost interest, weeping through the lunch hour. It escalated until she was found lying prone on the ground, asking God to strike her from the earth. When Elizabeth slipped the girl a piece of candy to cheer her up, she dug a hole out by the fence and buried it.

  Elizabeth could remember feeling this way. As a little girl, she peeked during a game of hide-the-thimble and was told by mother that cheating would ruin the game for everyone. At this, she crawled into the bathtub and tortured herself with thoughts of what she had done to a simple afternoon. She remembered wanting to start over entirely, to take the lessons she had learned and apply them to a new family—though surely none would take her in, knowing her history of ruining things. She decided to find a home on the street. She left notes of farewell on her siblings’ pillows that evening, with sincere apologies for ruining the game for everyone, and Mother found her at the end of the block, carrying a wedge of cheese and five books wrapped in a cloth.

  Isadora, on the other hand, lived a wholly blameless life. She would shrug it off, rejecting the claim like a government official sending back an order that possessed some trivial flaw. Once Deirdre was born, it took only a few months for the rest of them to abandon the fantasy that the child would unearth in her mother some healthy sense of right and wrong, some element of guilt. That was Elizabeth’s hope, anyway, and it was dashed early on: one day around lunch, the baby was pulling on the tablecloth when she upended a bowl of soup over herself. It was Isadora’s soup, and she had certainly placed the bowl too close to the edge of the table to make room for her writing, but she only watched the scene as if it was happening onstage, sitting in silence while a nurse rushed in, tore off the screeching child’s dress, and hauled her into the kitchen. After they left, Isadora shook her head as if she were clearing a web and returned to her notes.

  Elizabeth imagined that Romano’s mother would have kissed and caressed his knees and ankles, his belly, which then would have been soft and blooming with infa
nt flesh. She had read that true artists had use of a third eye, which they employed to know the world. Romano’s third eye wasn’t behind his knee—she had already thoroughly prodded both—but she hadn’t had a chance to check his armpits or between his toes. Maybe it rested on the domed muscular plain between his scrotum and anus, rapidly blinking in the bath or staring rueful into the toilet. Perhaps the doctors found it when his appendix threatened to burst and they opened him up to save him. She imagined a surgeon discovering the furious eye, agonized in the fresh light of the operating theater. The surgeon would have to work around it to remove the appendix and then tuck the eye like a child into the dark warmth of the body.

  It had to be somewhere, anyway, for Romano was a true artist and had earned her respect with the reverent way he spoke about his work. He was most interested in bronze, and would cast flat slabs to reveal their texture. He loved to talk about his favorite pieces, the way each reflected and radiated heat and how one might change when grouped with others, how each took on a kind of charge. While she lay around, thinking of him, he was surely doing something far more serious. She wondered if he drank coffee with his mother in the afternoons, if he read the paper in Italian or English, if he ever thought of the woman who walked into the sea, if he might someday change his mind about Germany, and if he thought of her fondly, if he thought of her at all.

  Isadora takes a short trip up the coast with the goal of helping someone besides herself for once

  The ferryman used a javelin to shove off the stone, and the two of us held the rail until we got going. The Bosporus is so clogged with steamers, each making its own choppy waves, that the two of us have to constantly brace against the ragged wood paneling on the side of the boat to keep upright.

  “Ayastefanos,” the ferryman says.

  Penelope had been all set to forbid my travel, but in the morning she found herself hunched and glaring at the toilet bowl. When I was pregnant with Patrick, my gut would always soothe with a tablespoon of brown liquor, but when I offered the remedy, she waved me off. And so I finished my morning ritual: until a few days ago I had been sprinkling just a bit of ash from the wooden box over my breakfast. Once I ran out of lighter ash and the texture bore larger grit, I had to start taking the larger pieces and swallowing them like pills. As of this morning, about a quarter cup remains. Soon I will have consumed them both.