Isadora

by Amelia Gray

  “You are very young still,” she points out. “And you know I still love you.” She loves me still! I feel it in her embrace, in which I smell lavender from her garden. Touching me like a mother and lover both, with an intensity made to endure the whole of life, she loves with the bravery of a war-ballad general; a heroic figure, albeit outnumbered.

  “Some music!” she cries, striking the table. She leans on me to stand, pressing my forearms and working up to my shoulders and the top of my head, blessing every part of me before she goes to find the pianist.

  In Darmstadt, an extravagant breakfast becomes an opportunity for Elizabeth to claim something of her own

  While Elizabeth was away, Max had begun feeding the girls an American-style breakfast. He made the decision after reading an article positing that such a meal, executed with proper extravagance, would shore up one’s strength for the entire day. Though he took only tea and a single piece of sour bread for himself—and firmly encouraged this meager meal on Elizabeth as well, insisting it was the only thing for two adults—the girls enjoyed a true bounty, tucking into oatmeal and biscuits with butter and jam, soft-boiled eggs yielding to their cracking spoons, hotcakes bloated with maple syrup, fried potatoes, various fruits in season, and a full five quarts of milk among them. Elizabeth arrived home to find the girls eating meat again; Max had the cook prepare breakfast sausage, ham steaks, and rashers of bacon, which sizzled from the oven and seemed more than anything to alarm the girls, who had been raised good meat-eating Germans but had grown accustomed to the house-standard vegetarian fare that had been Isadora’s order.

  After everything was served, Max would take a slow turn around the table, examining each plate before anyone was allowed to eat. On occasions in which extra vitality was required, such as recital days, he asked the cook to add a tablespoon of cream to each cup of milk. The woman brought a cold pitcher of it to the dining room and made the supplement as they all sat in silence. Sometimes she poured a little cream into their orange juice by accident, and the girls said nothing, though the dairy clumped at the surface. Elizabeth knew from the way the woman’s hand shook on the pitcher that she was afraid of Max, and the girls didn’t much care for him either.

  Breakfast was a daunting task. To motivate them while they struggled through their plates, Max would stand at the front of the table, telling the story of the food. He claimed that the almonds were from Puerto Rico, the sugar from India, and the jam sourced all the way from California—the home state of your dear mistress, he would announce, a hand on Elizabeth’s shoulder. In truth they ate whatever the cook could find at the lowest price, remainders and cracked eggs, everything just this side of spoiled. Still, the girls seemed to like thinking that things had been done specially for them. They had all been taught that ladies should appreciate a man’s effort over his results, and so they took seconds and thirds, stuffing themselves like little queens. After the meal they eased themselves from the table with a collective groan, waddling to their first calisthenics class, where one or two would invariably vomit.

  Once everyone had gone, Elizabeth was left with a table of scraps. On Max’s request, she took her notepad and walked from plate to plate, making a record of which girl had left food behind. She was supposed to hand over the list in the afternoon so that Max might study it, noting which nutrients each had missed and how the deficit affected their attitude and performance throughout the day.

  Ordinarily she would have refused this request and reminded him whose name was on the door, but she soon learned the task’s hidden benefit: she was alone with the food.

  Elizabeth went to work. She ate quickly and greedily, hunched over each plate, her eyes snapping left and right like an animal assuming quick predators. She took down Therese’s half grapefruit, using a steak knife to slice through the shallow wounds the girl had made with her serrated spoon. She stuffed herself with the curled bacon fat Lisa left at the edge of her plate. She drank every drop of Erica’s milk, licking cream from the rim, and swiped her finger through the melted butter from her plate as well. Irma never left anything behind, but Margot made up for it, leaving whole bowls of oatmeal and stewed plums, glistening untouched slabs of ham. Margot’s plate kept Elizabeth so sated, it was as if she had eaten the child herself. The others were harder to predict but she soon learned that everyone left something behind. She was very happy for a time, and hid happiness from the others so they wouldn’t suspect her for it.

  In Viareggio, mounting clouds suggest a storm of many days

  The sky over the beach is clear and fine, but Duse suspects a storm, pointing to a series of clouds on the horizon hanging like a wall of old ball gowns. “See how they persist,” she says.

  “I wanted to tell you, I’ve worked something out.”

  She frowns at the rack of clouds, as if my theory will arrive in the rain.

  “I believe that there is a collective energy, that enough people thinking the same thought has the power to alter the physical world.”

  “A democratic congress of thought,” she says. “Very American of you.”

  “I mean to say a kind of system of—how do you say it? When there are smaller creatures and larger, and some will move to eat the others?”

  “Ecology.”

  “An ecological system. There are strong-minded people—like you, my dear—who over one act can bend her audience to her will. And then there are weaker creatures who couldn’t save their own mothers’ souls if they spent every day at their bedside.”

  “Admitting to souls at last?”

  “Don’t be such a Catholic. I’m trying to make a point.”

  “Christ is a strength you will not even have to pray to,” she says, looping her arm around my waist. “Thereness, my lass.”

  Viareggio has been left to the locals. Since yesterday they’ve pulled down the awnings and shuttered the promenade. The temperature has fallen by discernible degrees. The only sign of life on our walk is a man standing at his window on the second floor of one of the pink gabled houses. Before I can get a good look at him, he goes back in.

  “And so you believe a group can change the course of fate,” she says.

  “I believe in a power, driven by a collective thought, that could alter the course of your entire life.”

  “How could that be, though?”

  “Describe your life four years ago.”

  A thin vine of lightning transpires across the horizon line, too far off for thunder. “I left the stage because I had no use for it,” she says, “and because I had fallen in love with Lina. We moved into the little house in Florence, and there was no pleasure to compare with what I found in love.”

  “Yes, and before that happened, you wanted another production with Teddy.”

  “Of course I had to put all those things on hold.”

  “And between your desire for a production, I remember, there was the profile of you in the Times, the one that called you a tragic genius.”

  “I always thought that phrase was a bit much, but of course I liked it.”

  “I’m saying that profile altered your fate in ways you may not have realized at the time.”

  “What do you mean? I don’t understand you, say it in English.”

  I hate it when she pretends not to understand my Italian, which is very good, but I obey her. “People began to think of you as a tragic genius, and it so happened you started behaving very strangely after that. Remember when you left a set of keys dangling from your front door and lived in constant fear for weeks that thieves would make legal entry? Or when you gave your last performance in Pisa? You came out for three encores and then forgot to remove your stage makeup for weeks. They called you the Madwoman of Crespina.”

  “Angels of rain and lightning,” she says, watching the clouds.

  “Pay attention. Something threw you into a love that was fated to be tragic.” The wind tries mightily to work through our clothes. I draw her close, kissing the place where her jaw meets the flesh of her neck
, just above the ivory button of her collar.

  She coughs in response and shrugs me off. “Your point that the hand of God intervened.”

  “I mean the very opposite.”

  She gasps. “Very Catholic, indeed!”

  “Not God or the Devil, but an earthly power drawn from a simple desire, from men and women seeing your picture in the newspaper and wishing you well.”

  “Well wishes cannot change the world!”

  “It was desire, as real as your hand, made manifest in your life. Every time the paper prints your name, you must contend with tens of thousands of desires tipping the scales for or against you according to the whims of the culture.”

  “You’re saying that tens of thousands of people wished that I would quit acting? I’m well aware I’m not universally loved,” she says, switching back to Italian, working a stone into the sand with the toe of her boot. “But I would think I have more friends than enemies among readers of the evening edition.”

  “It’s not quite so simple. Think of the fable of the children who found the creature in the sand—do you know it? They found a creature and wished upon it, and their wishes were ruined by reality. They wished to be beautiful, and their friends no longer recognized them, or they wished for a castle and were besieged.”

  I had used the wrong Italian word for besieged, saying rather that the children in the castle were delayed, as if by a train, but she seems to understand. “They were all wishing me well,” she says, frowning.

  “Precisely right. Everyone who read your profile piece and looked at your beautiful face in profile and read of your tragic genius, they closed their eyes and wished that you would find love and comfort.”

  “But they didn’t realize that love and comfort removes the tension that puts me onstage—”

  “—and love is the ruin of all, precisely.”

  “And you believe the fate of the children was brought about in this way.”

  “Or similar.”

  “What could anyone wish that would have caused this?”

  “I don’t know. That I would create a series of funeral dances, or that I would write entertaining memoirs. Everyone loves a good story. Nobody would have wished the children dead, but we so rarely understand what we are asking for when we make a wish.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When I was deathly ill on Corfu, I later learned, the papers were reporting my plans for a triumphant return, they said I danced at the funeral. A waltz! If your happiness could be altered by well-wishers, imagine the ruin that could come to pass from their judgment. If enough people choose to wish me out of existence, I might as well vanish.”

  “They said you were dancing?”

  “I couldn’t believe it myself. Can you imagine me choosing a waltz? I would have done a processional if anything. There’s no accounting for taste, I suppose.”

  “This is all rather mystical,” she says in a way that suggests she has not fully dismissed it.

  “Nobody wants to live in a world where children can drown. You’ll see. They’ll wish they never heard my name, and I’ll never work again.”

  “Look there,” she says, pointing to the lightning at the edge of the sky. “It’s Shelley’s ashes flashing. Do you see? He is walking over the waves.” The lightning does resemble a man, a bodily current. Curtains of cloudbanks drape either side. She tucks her chin over my shoulder, watching him. “Life goes on no matter what we wish,” she whispers. “It goes on just the same.”

  In Darmstadt, Max and Elizabeth put their distance aside in the name of business

  Singer had written them both to say that he would appreciate their presence with the girls at the new school in Bellevue. It was unusual of Isadora not to send word herself, and Elizabeth wondered if perhaps it was because she hadn’t yet returned to France.

  She didn’t think much of it; there was too much to do. Arrangements would have to be made with families of the six girls Max had chosen to bring with them to the new school. It was a monumental effort to take all six of them on, even without considering the instruction and boarding fees they lost when they made the transition from students to employees. They needed costumes, sandals, and supplies for travel; Paris insisted on paying for six ludicrous sets of matching luggage, but Elizabeth was the one who had to fill the order. But she was glad for the girls, really. She could see how each of them played a willful and necessary part, and losing any one of them, even the youngest, would do something to destroy the larger whole.

  Dealing with their mothers was another problem entirely. Elizabeth handled them all with separate conferences, in which most of them came around to see her points. She decided in the end that if Margot’s mother maintained her hysterics and wanted the girl back, they were only a day away by train. There was the usual hassle of arranging the lesser dancers with the lesser instructors and encouraging everyone to achieve their dreams no matter what the reviews said. The chosen six would perform one last recital before they left, which Max arranged to inspire the others to work harder in their absence.

  The morning of the recital, the cook was trying to get rid of the surplus of food, and the girls’ plates were piled so high that Elizabeth was sick for the rest of the day. But she ate, feeling that she might not eat that well ever again. A rotten foreboding sense had attended her for weeks, one that hadn’t been chased away with her usual calls for good luck. She tried to wash it down with milk and ham steaks.

  They opened the auditorium, which was usually shuttered owing to the expense of light and heat. Elizabeth had the furnace started at dawn, but the room still retained the traces of chilly air that made it feel more like a library or a mausoleum than a performance space. They had a heavy curtain arranged as a backdrop, and the velvet seam opened to a window facing the street.

  The girls were accompanied by Miss Venneberg on the piano, her long neck tipped thoughtfully to the side as she played, glancing up at her charges and matching her tempo to their expression.

  Elizabeth noticed a lot of improvement among the six, though they still tripped around like enchanted sprites without sense or direction. Serious Irma led the group from its center, drawing from a power in her core body so evident it seemed nearly to glow, and the older girls were patient with Margot, holding her hands. There was an instinctive feel to their leaps, as if the girls had descended from a race who used such movement as language or currency. Of course, this play at spontaneity had been whittled from their own wooden limbs. She had to admit that in her absence they had found an ease she had not been able to teach them.

  Max leaned over. “They are very strong.”

  “Frau Venneberg plays well,” Elizabeth responded before she realized her own passive insult. But he ignored her, and she hoped that perhaps he hadn’t heard. She watched as his right hand minced across the crease of his trousers in time with the treble clef.

  The whole thing was over in fifteen minutes, the girls having completed three ensemble dances and one solo each. Irma arranged herself and the others in a line to take their notes.

  Margot was distracted by the window, where outside, the gardener was smoking a cigarette in full view. She was troubled, remembering how her mother once said that a man smoking a cigarette was no good and to tell her if she saw one, and then she told Mama right away that she had seen a man smoking just that morning by the fish market, then Mama said she was speaking of a certain man, and Margot ran all the way back to the market to ask the man if he felt certain or uncertain, and the man took out his thing and showed it to her, all to say a man smoking a cigarette made Margot very nervous indeed.

  After notes, Max and Elizabeth walked back to her room. She let him go on about the recital, though she preferred to leave such things behind, thinking of how many recitals she had seen and how many still to come. She was grateful that he wasn’t upset over her comments during the performance; she tried to prepare herself to defend them just in case, but found she couldn’t remember what they were. As he talked, s
he changed clothes for the evening, and though they didn’t touch each other, she appreciated the intimacy of the moment. She saw in the slim mirror how her belly strained with the big breakfast, and resolved to take the long way to the grocery for the evening paper. Max went on about each girl’s contribution to the dance, the energy from one guiding the innocence of another, and so forth, as Elizabeth lay back on the bed, buoyed by the cakes and milled grains and meat, cream lapping at the tender ridge of her gut. He was still talking when she fell asleep.

  Off the coast of Viareggio, Isadora takes a swim and meets an unlikely friend

  After two days of rain, it’s hard to know if the sky is falling into the sea or if the sea is spiraling up into the sky.

  I escaped my leaking cottage to find Duse still asleep in hers. One of the boys was hanging around, and I had him find my friend’s rain gear, pinning my skirt up around my waist and forcing my feet into her rubbers. He found me a charming parasol, which swiftly flipped upside down in the wind and ripped clean in two before I had even stepped off the porch.

  The storm has erased the distinction between the sky and its stage. Everything is upended; cloudy water churns a ragged ridge of sand. One of the old bathing machines snapped its axle and lies half buried, its door wagging in the high tide.

  Planting the broken parasol like a flag over my discarded clothes, I enter the sea in bloomers. The water is strangely tepid, as if it wishes to impersonate my body, and my lungs have improved enough to plunge under far longer than before, suspended alongside the waterborne sand. I rush and retreat in an endless leap, the movement upending me, as I am twisted two ways, drawn out by the whim of the world as above me the rain holds constant, a fluid sense extending miles above. Distant lightning startles the fish swimming circles around me; we feel the tingling electricity muted by miles of water. My senses could use a good shock, but swimming closer to the horizon doesn’t seem to boost the charge. Still, I swim and swim until even the storm can’t keep up with me and turns back to the beach.