Isadora

by Amelia Gray

“Yes,” he said. “It’s too bad.”

  Without a second thought, he reached out and took Trella’s hand. They stood there waiting for the train like a charming young couple. He pictured the pale features their children would have, and he was working out their names when she wiggled her fingers from his grip.

  She tucked her leather-tipped finger into her cuff to look at her watch again. “The trains,” she said.

  “I told you. They’re slow.”

  “You said the clocks were slow.”

  He realized the fatal mistake he had made in reaching for her. Though the action had laid just one thimbleful of power on her side of the scale, it had been more than enough weight to tip it in her favor. He hadn’t known the measure until he exceeded it. He wanted to apologize to her, to be forgiven, and he hated that impulse in himself.

  He would have to tell a joke in order to save the balance. He would tell a good joke, she would laugh, and all would be well. He only needed to think of a joke. Something about the time. Better not to overthink it.

  “They say everything is slow in France,” he said.

  She sighed. Before he even saw the look on her face, he felt it. In her sigh he heard the history of his own failure and the future of it.

  It was all such a drain on the spirit. Max blamed the train station for giving him a feeling of malaise. It only reminded him of what a homebody he had become. He wasn’t a young man anymore, but he would make another trip, eventually. Perhaps to Vienna, to visit his mother’s grave. He would sit and tell her the story of his afternoon at the train station and the failed joke, and his theories as well, and she would listen with the half smile she always wore to hear his fantasies about the future, the plans she always knew were beyond him.

  20 February 1914

  Firenze, Pergola

  Teddy Craig, Direttore

  Pieno come un uovo

  Teddy—

  I’ve locked myself in again, this time saddled with child. It saps my strength and blood to make its own, a tiny capitalist within me taking an hourly wage in pounds of flesh. Truth be told, I am thrilled by this weakness for what it means: this child has the power to conquer the whole ruined city of my heart.

  I’m certain you can appreciate the feeling of gestating an idea expelled whole. I believe sincerely that if men could give birth, there would be many fewer novels and fewer operas too, perhaps more poetry but no plays at all. You would forget the stage, surrounded by a brood built and warmed by your very own flesh. It would be only natural.

  Everyone here is ready for winter to end, but I hope it stays forever. I’m grateful for the ice and cold, grateful that you haven’t yet responded, though of course I was furious when that card came from old Harry Kessler—Thinking of you in this heartbreaking &c. You can imagine Harry holding the evening paper at arm’s length so as not to catch any transmissible element of our tragedy. Of course I looked carefully among each one of his words for penciled dots in case you had sent me a code to break. I thought you might have wanted to convey some earnest thought, hidden as the best thoughts are, something to prove your heart was as freshly carved as mine.

  But there was nothing there, and your feelings on the accident remain a mystery. Perhaps you can’t bear it and May is keeping you from rafters and sharp objects. Perhaps you’ve locked the thought of it away, like the door to a particularly untidy cellar, ignoring the crying down there until it stops. Or perhaps you only blame me.

  For a time, your silence was my greatest daily interest, though I wouldn’t admit it to anyone here. Of course I knew you would avoid the funeral—I would have escaped it if I could—but then I didn’t hear a word from you. I thought of asking after you among our mutual friends but imagined Ernst and Magda and even Charles staring into middle distance as if they were trying to place your name. I couldn’t take the humiliation.

  Eventually, though, your silence became a comfort. Everyone else had reached out in some way to pay their respects, with enough offers to comfort and hold me. After wading through all that ordinary love, I was grateful that I could assign something more meaningful to you. No postal service could reach the depths of your experience, where you grieved alone. You were suffering in a way I didn’t have the courage to even imagine. In this way, I forgave you your silence.

  Writing these letters has given me comfort and I hope comfort is what you find in them. I am the lighthouse to your wayward ship, beaming a welcome and warning from home.

  The weather improves enough for Paris to make a decision that proves risky

  The new runway was fresh and keenly poured, and Cigare carved through it like a fingernail through a tray of oil. Everything seemed sturdier the second time around; the plane was as heavy as a banker’s desk but simple to maneuver, wheeling on the whims of air as they cleared the field. Paris grazed the low-lying fog as old Compton Castle emerged, its fortress walls a dry dam restraining the landscape. He was so taken with it all that he found he had angled the plane toward the stone walls of the castle and had to pull the nose up at the last moment, whooping with the rush to his senses. Right then and there, he decided to alter his course, to fly the Channel from Torquay to Auderville rather than going up to Dover and then over the water. He would see more familiar sights that way, town and country, the Paignton Pier, and the Channel beyond. He might even see the homes of the local men who helped him with the hangar and craft. He could wave down to them.

  He hadn’t done the calculations on this new route, but figured it would be simple enough, a little less time over land was all. It was a smooth ride at first and a beautiful one, with a lovely view of the pier. Then the land gave way to the Channel, and he felt the air change as he came out over brackish water the color of a woman’s eyes—of Lillie’s eyes, he thought, imagining her peering down at him as she stroked his hair, his head in her lap. In early days she wore a linen shirt to bed and pinched his ear when he teased her for it. How young they had been. In the rare times his wife appeared to him, she usually took the form as when he last saw her, disappointed in the door to his study, asking for his return itinerary though she knew he didn’t have one. This memory with his head in her lap must have been in London, before they went back to New York and everything fell to pieces. He was disgusted with himself.

  To distract himself from his own failure, Paris turned his mind to the failure of others. There was the time Isadora accused him of flirting with an actress at a party and made a scene everyone talked about for months. The actress had been wearing a delicate silver tiara, and Isadora pulled it right off her head, too drunk to be coy about it and laughing in the shocked silence. She wore the tiara arched over her shoulder like a spangled epaulet and was later seen kissing the consulate general. Paris liked to pull that one out when he felt especially bad about himself, and he spent a moment enjoying the memory of the poor girl cowering under her gloves, trying to cover the fresh bald spot where some of her golden hair had been snatched away.

  It was darker over the water than he thought it would be. He held Cigare steady below the thick clouds, but it was difficult to see where the water met the sky. Paris began to realize the risk he had taken. His altimeter jostled among the other things in the waxed linen bag on his lap; a pride in his own bearing had stopped him from installing the device on the dash. And now it was too late; he couldn’t spare the attention it would require to find it and read it. He had no choice but to hold steady to his own waning conviction about his coordinates, to his sense of direction and elevation. Conviction, he tried to assure himself, was more important than certainty. He hoped his pride had been punished enough.

  He tried to picture the suburb around his destination at Issy-les-Moulineaux, which he remembered as being quite posh. Once he landed, he would hire a car to take him to the Bellevue school, where he would find the students scattered like new fawns across the lawn, running to embrace him, their very first patron. He hadn’t met this new crop but trusted they would be good girls like the ones who had come befor
e, earnest and serious, and kind to their friends. They might have an impromptu recital in celebration of his arrival, and he would sit at the right hand of their founding genius and watch the slow smile play across her face as the night progressed.

  The wind over water lulled him into thought. He found himself entertaining an endless receiving line of thoughts, arranged in his mind like the funeral crowd when Isadora locked herself in the cremation room and left him to deal with the reception. A few of the women spoke of Patrick in an attempt to explain their special window into his grief; the papers wouldn’t list him, but the gossips could do whatever they wanted. A journalist from the Arts section found it was an appropriate time to ask him Isadora’s opinion on other forms of new movement, free expression in the American South, and certain Gypsy modes, and he found himself appreciating the man’s insolence and wanting to take him out for a drink. The truth was, Isadora had no interest in artistic citizenship or civility and hated anything that didn’t spring from her own mind. It was a trait Paris couldn’t understand; as a businessman, it was important to lay the foundation of common ground in order to make it possible down the line to buy the competition out.

  The funeral felt like a government function, for all the dignitaries there, and the artists looking for free sandwiches. Ted Craig had been unable to find the courage to attend, so Paris took on the role of Deirdre’s father as well. He remembered the little woodland plays the girl had invented. She would declare Paris the Forest King, draping him with garlands and taking his hands to show him her dollies arranged as ladies-in-waiting. He thought of her inventive plays as he stood at the head of the reception line and listened to each stranger tell him how beautiful she was. It would be another hour before he realized that Isadora had gone home without him. He returned to the flat to find her with her siblings, all of them devastatingly drunk, having finished the week’s liquor along with the cooking wine and an ancient-looking tincture of opium Raymond had found in the back of a cabinet. “All the men and women of the world are my children,” Isadora was saying, her eyes miserably crossed, tumbling into a heap of silk scarving. “All the dark matter of this earth extends from me.” Elizabeth was smashing plates in the sink, her hands a bloody mess, and Gus was asleep in the bathtub, facedown in an inch of water that would have killed him if Paris hadn’t pulled him out. Raymond sat in the corner and wept.

  A gull screamed above, its call lost in the wind. Paris was gripped with the sudden fear that he had arranged a subtle seabound bearing that would soon send him into the water. Digging in his instrument bag, he found the thermometer, then the balance gauge, and finally the altimeter, but it was no use; even if he could make a proper reading, he would need to figure the conversion from hectopascals to meters above sea level.

  He put everything back and focused on soothing himself. The Channel below was undistinguished by chop or vessel but seemed far enough away for comfort. Everything was probably fine, and if it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be much fuss to it. He laughed aloud to think he had wanted to try for a distance record.

  Just when he had made peace with the likelihood that his adventure would end more gracelessly than planned, he saw in the distance the craggy line of Sainte-Anne and blessed Auderville beyond. The sight of land startled him, and he pulled back so suddenly on the elevator that he thought for certain he had broken the pulley and was done for, that he would stall out and tumble, like one of the opera’s paper programs he had folded and flown to make the children laugh from their box over the orchestra level, all of them watching its glide to the stage and ducking when it inevitably fell into the orchestra.

  But the pulley caught and hauled, and Cigare ran true, nosing down as gentle as a calf, and then he was back on course, following a rail line, the roads and spires simple to gauge with the naked eye. A few hundred kilometers of easy navigation remained to the trip. Soon enough he would be in Issy-les-Moulineaux, with its shops and cafés. If it was warm enough, he might walk to Bellevue, picking up a baguette and something to drink along the way. They would all stay up late eating and talking. Though perhaps it was too cold to walk; he remembered he had read in the paper that winter in the capital had been so bitter that a starving wolf running through the streets had slaughtered a schoolgirl in broad daylight, leaving only a few bones and part of her pinafore. No shortage of surprises in the modern age.

  Elizabeth takes her seat to enjoy the first recital at Bellevue

  It was a stunning hall, with a freshly painted stage. The theatre at Bellevue had previously served the lobby of the old hotel, and beautiful velvet seats had been installed where the guests used to take their tea. The architect had decided to keep the massive check-in counter intact at the back of the house, and Elizabeth half expected to find the girls back there, playing concierge and advising one another grandly on imagined day trips around a city they wouldn’t have a chance to explore.

  But of course the girls wouldn’t dare fool around. They were backstage with Isadora, who inspired in them such a serious nature it made Elizabeth question her own skills as an instructor. She had to admit that Isadora inspired respect; or perhaps, six mothers had impressed it on their girls. Either way, Isadora was the one who would turn them into dancing stars if only they worked hard enough and prayed to her every night.

  Mother and Max had taken their seats before the others, so were forced to speak to each other. Elizabeth sat just in time to hear Max start in on the female body, using his hands to illustrate thick calves and broad shoulders. Any other woman would have been mortified, but Max was lucky enough to find Dora Duncan an easy audience, and as Trella arranged her score, he was engaging the older woman in his basic strength test, where she worked to press down on his outstretched hands. “Very good,” he said. “Very, very good.”

  Someone clapped briskly backstage, and the performance started at once. Trella started with Chopin. In the first piece, all six girls played spirits made wicked by the night, rushing around in a coven. Then while Margot skipped among them, the older girls stood as sentient columns, animating one by one to follow the sprite. After that, they executed the Tanagra figures with a grace and patience beyond their years. Irma still led, but each girl’s personality had begun to take shape. They turned from mood to mood as easily as laying out a deck of cards. Therese stepped as light as batting to cross the stage, turning at the waist to call the others, and Elizabeth had to resist the impulse to leap from her seat to follow; it was a perfect articulation. It was desire they inspired, not sexual, but bodily, an idea they had all been working toward for months.

  Partway through the peasant mazurka, there came a noise at the back of the hall, an inarticulate banging as the door was forced against the thin locks straining to stay it. The girls stopped onstage, then the music, and the little audience nervously turned to see the door wrenched open to reveal Paris, windswept and worse for wear, beating the ice from his gloves against the concierge desk at the back of the hall. He held a valise and a wide canvas bag, and he ran his shaking hand through his hair. He looked like a traveling salesman who had been forced to work through a holiday to meet his quota and had reached his wit’s end in the home of his largest client.

  Trella stood from her piano, but Paris pointed at the stage until she sat and returned to the score. The girls scrambled to find their marks again as he came down and took a seat on the other side of Max. Elizabeth found it interesting that Isadora hadn’t come out to check on the noise, which meant she either knew he was coming or didn’t care.

  Mother made a chuffing noise and leaned stiffly to allow her hands to be grasped. It occurred to Elizabeth that it was the first time the two had met; Mother hadn’t left Oakland in ten years, and Singer had had no interest in traveling to California, feeling business prospects west of the Mississippi tacky and faddish. Elizabeth watched as the two of them whispered years’ worth of condolences and congratulations and remarks on the weather, which, judging from the man’s appearance, had taken a swift turn for the worse.<
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  Irma and Erica made an arch with their hands, stretching as tall as they could. The others ran through one at a time and paused at the edge of the stage, lifting their arms as if they had just realized that they could not possibly continue their destined path on the planet and would have to ascend into heaven. And then, as if the sublimity of the moment was too much to bear, each of them withered and fled to the upstage curtain.

  They came through a second time, and lined up for a third when Irma broke the arch to hear something that had been called out from the wing. She whispered to the others, who stopped where they stood. Trella held a minor chord as if she were waiting for someone to turn her page. None of them moved as the chord dwindled to nothing.

  It was in total silence—her dancers still, her audience breathless—that Isadora made her return to the stage.

  She entered, gallant in a crimson mantle, a robe regally wrapped around her body. Her hair was bound up with flowers and cords of thick red rope. The girls wavered in their positions, watching her steady step. Even the curtains flanking the stage swayed toward her as she passed.

  Ceasing her movement upstage, she signaled to Irma and Erica to lift their arms again. The others dropped to the floor and lay prostrate in wonder. Isadora stepped under the trembling arch. The moment she passed, the older girls fell to the floor as well.

  She spread her arms wide, holding out her reaching hands to take in the warmth of the light. The goddess had come to take dominion, to bless and destroy. Her eyes glowed with redemptive fury as the mantle parted to reveal her tunic, where the swell of her pregnancy had come to strain against the cloth. She lowered her arms and cradled her thickening body, her cheeks flushed by the lights. Isadora spoke, saying:

  “It is a new Era.”

  Mother shrieked. “My child!” she cried, running for the stage.

  “Mother!” Isadora returned, coming to her knees at the edge of the stage.