Isadora

by Amelia Gray

  17 August 1913

  Teatro della Pergola

  Teddy Craig, Direttore

  Qualcosa bolle, Firenze

  Ted, I’m doing my level best but the dances are coming out all wrong. Dance is a transient art and I am sleeping under its bridges. Consider my staging for Jeux the bum rush:

  Deux enfants! Deux faunes! C’est Jeux. Fine linen skirts, rackets strung to humming. The world truncates at the edge of the stage in a haze of electric light. In the performance of fantasy one can fill the seats with whomever they choose, and so a group of precious friends shuffle programs as the curtains rise.

  Lights on me, dressed and styled as Nijinsky, sui generis, heart pounding over stalk-strong legs. My disguise is of a working man with short pants belted, shirt tucked broad into the waist. The luxury of leaping strength! The thigh’s coiled spring! I am a wolf wearing the skin of a wolf.

  The children don’t fit their costumes. Deirdre holds her long skirt up in fistfuls at her waist while Patrick toddles along behind, tripping over himself like an old man in pajamas. Because there is no costumer but my own memory, I can only blame myself; they are so large in my mind, so perfect. I remember the time a wasp landed on the back of Patrick’s hand, I caught and crushed it between my fingers before even thinking of the danger, and the barb that embedded itself in my fingertip grew to a boil within the week. But then perfection must be guarded.

  (Briefly: we of course are taking some liberty with the performance, which was conceived to be expressed in the bodies of three men, a sensual portrait. Nijinsky wanted the discomfort of held poses to heighten a sense of danger just off stage. The last time he and I spoke he turned a book in his hand over and over as if he was doing a magic trick, that a scroll might fall from the spine detailing the route to a hidden glen in which, under a pile of half-scorched kindling, we might find the location of his truest self. In the course of production this secret garden was paved over, two of his beautiful men became women, the aeroplane that was supposed to crash onto the stage at the end of the third act made a lengthy and confounding transformation into a tennis ball tossed by a member of the crew, whose hand in turn became the hand of God, évidemment. He had his dancers scatter as if the ball were the wrenching metal of his fantasy, and it all must have looked very funny but then compromise always does.)

  The children fumble through their pliés and port de bras. My power coiled and masquerading draws strength from the assembled as I breathe into the engine of my solar plexus, warming the heart and gut as if my organs are gathered around a fire, embered ribs forging a fulcrum point. This is a play of human spirit, real and present, a foundation laid at the perimeter of light, a wall against the barren world.

  When I finally come to move, I bring this power and bear them with it. As I lift the children onto my shoulders, we become a towering figure of ideal love, a pillar that cannot be touched by any hand of God or man or passing time. Let the water come.

  The oracle earns a healthy day rate by assuring everyone of their strengths and ignoring their weaknesses entirely

  Raoul emerges, looking as if he has just been alerted to the presence of a set of magical stairs laid into the far wall.

  “What news of your love?” I ask.

  “Love!” he says, taking up an ashtray of wine and gazing dreamily at its speckled surface before sipping from it.

  The oracle pokes her head out of the bedroom. She has the look of a physician attempting to discern which between me and Penelope might be the most gravely ill. At last she points at me and goes back in.

  The heavy curtains have been drawn over the bedroom windows, giving the room a material lushness thick enough to trap and hold the day’s heat and likewise muting its sound. Anything I say will sink into the curtain and stay there until a maid beats at it with her broom and is shocked by the secrets that drop onto the carpet.

  The oracle takes a seat on the bed where, once my eyes adjust to the light, I see she has laid out a handful of bird bones and a crystal skull. She extracts feathers from her bag and deposits them in the center, pressing her palms to them. A fanned tarot deck lies facedown on the dresser. I’m half heartened to find that the room is as empty as it was this morning, no visitors beyond the oracle herself. Still, maybe she will see something I don’t.

  She gestures for me to join her on the bed, picking a feather from the pile and extending it like an olive branch. I’m grateful she has not experienced my general ignorance on the topic of rituals and the spiritual practice of paganism, which I’ve always talked about in the same way as a woman who has never been to France tilts her head to describe, from postcard memory, its various historic arches.

  She takes the feather back, then places the crystal skull in my hand, looking up as if its weight might register in my eyes. We sit together on the bed.

  “You are the daughter of the Sun,” she says. “You have been sent to Earth to give great joy to all people, and from this joy will be founded a religion. After many wanderings in the course of time, you will build temples all over the world.”

  “That’s flattering,” I say. She’s clearly trying to win me over. “I’m afraid you’ve got old information.”

  “My information is ancient, in truth.”

  “Thanks anyway. I do have two questions for you, though. In your opinion, what do you think are the chances that the dead are agonized by thoughts from the living? Or that a dark wish made by an entire population could have some physical effect on its object? That’s all I really want to know.”

  She pulls me back down onto the bed, taking me gently by the shoulders as if I’ve been talking in my sleep. She traces my collarbone with one of the feathers. “You are the daughter of the Sun.”

  “I am the daughter of Joseph Charles Duncan of Oakland, California, and I’m looking for my children. Their spirits were quite young, six and nearly three, they passed just a few months ago, and so may still be near. I was hoping you would have some information about them.”

  She frowns at the door.

  “Penelope put you up to this, didn’t she? She wants me to go back to work. She is a wicked one. Don’t go, I’m only joking. Sit here with me, I want to hear my fortune.”

  The oracle takes up her glass of champagne and downs it, coughing a little. “Salak woman,” she says.

  “You could at least read my tarot, you have the cards right here. Come, I have something for you.” Pressing a piece of folded money into her palm yields no further vision, but when I try to take the money back, she tucks it into her waistband.

  “All right,” I say, feigning good nature. “You don’t have to say a thing about the children. But before you go, you could at least tell me what you told Raoul.”

  She accepts more champagne from the bottle. “I saw the man on a great stage,” she says. She gazes at her crystal skull before kissing its forehead gently and wrapping it in a cloth.

  “Did you see his lover? He seemed to be much relieved.”

  She places the wrapped skull in a case and latches it. “I saw many lovers attending him in the wings and many more gazing at him from the assembled crowd.”

  “But one in particular? With a certain unique appearance perhaps, some special connection between the two of them?”

  Leaning over me, she collects the feathers. “I have built everything I have into my current practice,” she says. “Not everyone understands it, I know. Those who are sensitive enough to understand my skill trust that I will give them everything they need.” She wedges the cards into a small leather pouch that seems ill-suited for the purpose. “They would never suggest I contrive more detail than I’ve already provided. Please remember this is a power I have amassed over many years.” A baby cuddling a crystal skull in her bassinet. “Over time, I’ve found that some believe that my vision exists to present them with what they need, a gown tailored to fit. “People don’t see the value in this skill, because it works against what they wish. They would rather I repeat the story they’re alrea
dy telling themselves. These people might have more luck with an opinionated washwoman, but they come to me.”

  I lie down, as this will obviously take a while.

  “And yet they continue to come,” she says. “They want the security of celestial affirmation. And so the cycle continues, the disappointment continues, and my true clients keep coming back.”

  She takes my wrist, squeezing the vein in a rhythm to match the rhythm of my blood.

  “All these temples will be dedicated to Beauty and Joy because you are the daughter of the Sun,” she says.

  She leaves me then, in darkness, but I’m not alone for long.

  Perhaps they have been hiding behind the curtains this whole time, though it’s unlike them to keep quiet for long. I feel them as surely as my own weight on the bed. Patrick comes close and holds my face in his hands as Deirdre climbs onto me, pressing into my belly as if she could absorb herself into me. They talk, but I can’t understand them, they speak rapid and backwards. They smell of river stone. The bed is heavy with all the food I had ever fed them: toast and potatoes and strawberries, roast meat, chocolates and cheese and boiled eggs. My own warm milk soaks through the quilt and weighs us down.

  Around us, a murmuring rises in the well of darkness. I don’t dare look around the room. They loosen my tunic straps and expose my breast. Pawing at me, they nuzzle like pups, their impossibly cold cheeks warming against me. They nurse in icy silence while I stare past the ceiling, through the rafters and roof, until I find myself floating as thin as air above it, daring not to breathe, not to lose them again.

  III

  Isadora finds herself in the heart of the pine forest in Viareggio with Eleonora Duse, who has lately been considering the romantic idea of an early death

  The season ended, as they do, the moment everyone had begun to think it would last forever. Yesterday there was a city’s worth of women walking hand in hand, little children running for sweets along the passeggiata, bicycles and laughing men, tea at the Grand Hotel, and the lazy persistence of summertime strangers.

  But then this morning came wrapped in winter wind. They brought the blue umbrellas in, and everyone left for London and New York, even the newlywed rich, who had seemed ready to stay forever. Now, the only man in the water walks waist-high through the surf, working a cage into the sand and pulling it up again, sifting for rings and coins the season left behind.

  My time with Raoul ended as abruptly as the season. He took his leave while I was in with the oracle, without leaving a note, nothing to show his gratitude for how I saved his life. I suppose when a spell is broken there’s no sense in waiting around. I was left to pay the oracle, and while I was at it, I traded her leather pouch for the carved wooden box in which I was keeping the last of the children. Penelope wasn’t thrilled with the trade, as it was her box to begin with, but she had to admit that the ashes fit nicely in the pouch and seemed less liable to spill.

  Penelope’s brother sent word shortly after that, and she went to him, leaving just enough money to cover the hotel. Left in a lurch, I had just begun to worry when a telegram arrived from Duse reminding me of her setup on the coast, two little houses arranged together in the pine forest, close enough to walk barefoot and far enough to offer both guest and host some needed privacy. These messages come right when we need them and not a moment sooner, or if they come sooner, we forget. And so I went at once.

  My very favorite squat hen, Duse has retired to a coop of medals and painted plates, nestling among a lifetime of postcards and mementos, dried flowers strung over her counters and scattering their precious petals over all the food she prepares.

  She is fifty-five years old and as handsome as a girl, pushing me away without ceremony when I try to kiss her. She spends most afternoons walking along the sea, and never steps outside without her wide-brimmed hat, which is decorated with batting and feathers. My little dockbird, snagged in her own net. Still, I know for a fact that if we had an audition this afternoon, she would be the one called to try another scene while I could count myself lucky to be directed to a pile of mending in the back room and told where to bring the coffee.

  The flat morning air suits this numbness that has been building. Every emotion becomes too feeble to go beyond the confines of my mind, born to die alongside weakling thoughts such as my sense of duty to art and life. These malformed thoughts cry for my attention and cannot be soothed, and like any harried mother, I grow simple in my affect and begin to see life as a tourist taking in a roadside carnival, the type where the main attraction is a block of wood wrapped in bandages and presented as a mummified corpse.

  After Patrick’s birth I had been scheduled to go immediately on tour, but a strange sadness overwhelmed me. At last, the tour manager noticed that my dead-eyed marionette dances were disturbing the audience, and I was immediately sent to a doctor whose office featured a cool stone exterior wall covered in a moss so thick and vibrant I thought I might hear its life. The nurse found me standing out there, pressing my face to it.

  I was familiar with neurasthenia and prepared for its diagnosis. The nurse brought me in, and I found myself in the office of a young French physician, a man as thin as his medical license and equally lifeless, seeming pinned under glass. He listened vaguely to my heart and looked at my palms the way a psychic would before he announced that I was well and truly hysteric. He prescribed a rest cure, tapping his pen against a calfskin notebook as he spoke. I asked him to look again, and reluctantly he consented, examining my left eye and then my right with a silver scope and lifting my tongue to see if the answer was perhaps written there. I repeated my symptoms with my tongue pinched between his fingers: malaise, hopeless thoughts. But he maintained his diagnosis, noting gently that I lacked the neurasthenic constitution. He was a young and nervous man, and his hands shook as he fiddled with a gold-plated pen, insisting that I spend three months in bed.

  Through my clouded eyes I saw the future: he would tell the tour manager, who would dismiss me; there would be a notice in the paper reporting my inability to keep a simple series of evening shows. My condition would be taken into account for the rest of my life and subtly brought into talk of my salary, my performance and ability. This man would ruin me in a single afternoon.

  It was impossible to change his mind, but I had to try my best; he was already pressing the tip of his fine pen to the prescription pad. And so, for lack of a better idea, I stood, stepped lightly to the center of the room, and lifted my arms, palms up at shoulder height.

  I wasn’t sure what I meant to do exactly. When he asked, I said I was taking the pose of Blind Justice and would remain until my last breath or until the diagnosis rang true to my condition.

  His laughter turned to disbelief, then to complaints and pleading as five minutes passed, then twenty, an hour. He never opened the door to his waiting room, not wanting the nurses to see the negotiation. He was stubborn, which I appreciated, though when I complimented him on it, he didn’t respond. He said I was only proving his diagnosis and asked me to come off it. I said nothing in response but held my shaking arms in perfect position, imagining in a pleasurable way that I was nailed to a cross. If I were to die, it would be in self-defense.

  He began to suggest that he might have me committed to the sanitarium. I held on, knowing the end was near of either my life or his will. By then he was sitting on the floor, pleading with me.

  Finally he had enough. He opened his calfskin book and, with a long and suffering sigh, wrote a neurasthenic diagnosis compounded by the stress of a small dressing room. For treatment, he prescribed fatty meats and bread along with dark beer and regular walks, with only one weekend’s worth of suggested rest. Condition of the artist. I had him write it in three languages and then brought it to my manager, who sent a girl to the market at once.

  The manager wanted to keep the doctor’s note, but it was far too precious to me. I tucked it into the stirrups of my trunk to keep forever. I still marvel over it: a single sheet of paper that
would speak on my behalf if I lacked the will to speak, which I can cite as precedent for the rest of my life. Of course it’s back in France. Separated from it, I feel distant from my saner self.

  It’s a pleasant walk to the beach. The whole place is deserted, unless anyone’s hiding in the striped canvas dressing tents by the road. Though they get dingy quick with sand and sun, I far prefer those tents to the Victorian bathing machines that preceded them. Some of the hotels still keep the old things around, looking like outbuildings mounted on broad wagon wheels and tipped inelegantly to one side. Duse claims she still sees a few of the older ladies using them. The process is this: climb the steep grade of wooden stairs and lock yourself into a room that slants in a perfect diagonal. Once you’ve got your footing, you must work through every single one of your buttons and garters and belts and straps and yardage and stockings at that perilous angle, hanging it all on the hooks provided or else every delicate thing will fall to ruin. After that, you must hold the opposite walls with spread and trembling arms as, outside, your male companion hefts up the wooden rail and pulls the whole thing down into the water like an eager ox, at which point—if you weren’t brained on one of the wall-mounted hooks—you may emerge at the water with your modesty intact. In theory, it saves a lady the humiliation of being seen in her bathing gear, but in reality, anyone getting carted around in a splintering man-yoked box is going to get everyone’s attention. Seems better to stay home, most days.

  I’m grateful to Mother, who never went in on those old ideas. We spent long days at Sausal Creek, where she would watch us flailing from her spot on the shore. Calling out instructions only worked when we were above the surface to hear them, and so she started carrying a long metal hook that she used to fish us out if the situation became dire. I hated that hook and feared her for it, but here I am, in the waves. The social page reports that Mother is in Paris again. I’m sure she alerted the paper herself; I can see her frowning at the clock, as if my return is a simple matter of patience.