by Amelia Gray
“You humiliate me with your very presence! Go on, this instant. Go ply your sad trade elsewhere. Try your hand in a college or carnival. They can come laugh in your face instead of only behind your back. I haven’t wasted a moment of concern on your half-bit ideas. I know everything in your mind, you staggering shit, and I hate it.”
He reels back in surprise, his shoes leaving a thick black streak on the wood floor. The girl who was comforting him during the coughing spell takes off in a sprint to the other side of the room.
“All right,” he says, holding up his hands. “All right. Only one thing, my theory—”
“I know your theory, you idiot. And your opinion on my method, though you have not been brave enough to express it directly. You are so deeply tucked into the pocket of my good grace that I must dig you out with the crook of my finger in order to flick you off like the offending chunk of wet garbage you have become to me. Go back to Darmstadt and mind some failing farm. Make your lectures to a cow. Write letters to my sister if you want, she will use the pages to steady her desk.”
“I’ll leave,” he says. “It’s all right.” In grasping for his valise, he nearly tumbles, looking like a fawn slipping on black ice.
“You hack! It is not all right. You have failed to see how each planet in my orbit is lashed to me with diamond thread. Your lover, your students, your confidante men; they would each of them betray you in a moment, and they have. Everyone in this school has given you up for fun. Every subtle thought you’ve had was transmitted to my ear before you even finished thinking it. Now go on, get out of my sight.”
He doesn’t wait another moment, bowing as he runs to cross the studio, his bag banging against his thigh.
In an act of genius I never would have thought of myself, Irma unbuckles her sandal and throws it after him. It hits him flat on the ass as he grapples with the door, causing him to leap as if one of us has flown over and bit him. The girls burst into wild applause as he flings open the door and slams it behind him, and they keep up their clapping for Irma’s sandal on the floor as if it might animate and provide an encore. And so I have one less mouth to feed.
Max is obliged to take his leave
Elizabeth was finishing a letter at Max’s desk when he burst into the room.
“I wanted to use your desk,” she said, folding the letter into a book and turning to another chapter.
Ignoring her, he went for his old leather suitcase, picking it up with such force that one of the handle’s fasteners split and wagged against his thigh as he transferred the suitcase bodily to the bed.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “Where are your shoes?”
“Your sister,” he said. He balled up the shirts that had been delivered from the laundry and stuffed them into the suitcase along with his notebooks, shaving kit, picture postcards of Darmstadt, his velvet pencil pouch, and a button that had sprung the previous day from his vest. On top he arranged his books, six large volumes of study on the subject of the human body. He latched the case and tightened two large leather straps around it. “Your sister is a God-forsaking, linen-draped nightmare.”
“Are you crying?”
“She’s dismissed me,” he said, leaving a streak of pencil lead when he wiped the tears from his face. “She said she knew my thoughts, my theories and opinions. How did she know, Elizabeth?”
“You broke your old suitcase. Here, let me have a look—”
“Don’t touch it!” He threw the case down and leapt at her, finding the thin collar of her robe and pulling her forward. “Answer me! How did she know?”
Elizabeth remembered all the times he had lost his temper during party games, the rage that filled his red-rimmed eyes. She thought she had seen the extent of his physical malice, but this was different. He was on her, and she was afraid.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she sputtered. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
She heard the material of her robe straining against his fists, its delicate thread snapping stitch by stitch. She found herself hoping that he might rip it so that he would see what he had done, and be sorry. “Please,” she said, her voice shaking.
He released her and got down on the floor to reach under the bed, coming back with one of his slippers, which he flung against the far wall. He looked up at her, crouched like an animal.
“I don’t know where your other one is,” she said.
“Women should be strong,” he said. “Think of Cleopatra, of Catherine the Great, Joan of Arc at the stake. Imagine if they had possessed the physical strength to match their will. The Blessed Virgin, heavy with child, holding out until they reached a proper town for her to labor on clean linens; think of the order such an action would bestow upon the faith, the palliative sense of comfort. Physicians would be canonized with the saints they treated.
“Imagine Marie Antoinette fighting off the mob at the Tuileries, burning the place to embers, and emerging from the smoldering frame with Louis-Charles on her back. Her monarchical might dominating France. Can you imagine what it would do for the empire?”
“If you—”
“Shut up!” he shouted over her. “Shut up! I’m not speaking just to please myself! You can’t possibly understand what I’m trying to say if you don’t listen long enough for me to say it. Otherwise you are only employing your best guess, which, I can assure you, does not match my theories, not even remotely.” He pounded his fist into the floor to emphasize his point. “There is absolutely no reason why Isadora wouldn’t embrace physical strength as a female ideal.”
“It contradicts her artistic movement,” Elizabeth said. “To find the beauty of life and to express that beauty in the body.”
“To hell with the artistic movement!” he looked at her, his weak chin lifted. “Also, Singer is a godamned anti-Semite.”
Elizabeth did remember some ugliness coming from Paris at some point, but she had heard Max mention his childhood faith only once, in passing, and she was surprised to hear him fall back on it. She supposed shame was as good a reason as any.
Spotting the other slipper under the desk, he went to fetch it, picking up the first by the toe, as if it might be required to make a positive identification. “We’ll leave on the evening train,” he said.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said, surprised at this sudden allegiance. “Listen, Max, be reasonable. We could go talk to her together. Maybe when she knows you better, she’ll allow for your ideas. I can act as intermediary.”
“I mean to say, Trella and I will go.”
She stared at him until he looked away.
“You can join us when you’ve wrapped things up here.”
He put on his slippers and buckled the straps across his bag, tucking it under his arm to keep the broken handle from coming all the way off.
“Good luck with the grand artistic movement,” he said.
“And to you,” she returned graciously. “Give my best regards to Trella.” She crossed her toes, holding in her mind the image of the two of them trapped in the wreckage of a burning car.
And with that, he was gone. The room fell silent, and she listened for the sounds from outside. In the hall, Max struggled with the bag as he walked. Someone in a far wing was knocking at a door, and she heard the girls playing in the garden. She even discerned the slight, soft padding of Isadora’s bare footsteps going back and forth in the rehearsal room, a sound she could recognize anywhere.
Max was gone. He had left her alone with them.
On an unseasonably warm spring morning, three eat their breakfast at a table set for twenty and read of an accident at sea
There numbered two hundred and sixty-nine lost souls, all drowned with the Empress. Nearly every woman had gone down with the ship.
Though Mother wanted to know only the morbid details and Paris turned to the heroic tales of gentlemen and brave sailors, Elizabeth couldn’t tear her thoughts away from the women who died. She gazed at the ordered line of names in the news
paper column, their ages floating beside them in parenthesized lifeboats.
As she went down the list, Elizabeth tried to imagine each of the women from their names and ages, to invent a story in order to humanize each of them in her mind. An older woman became a glamorous French widow who showed kindness only to birds. Another became in Elizabeth’s mind a lovely girl, traveling for language study abroad. Another was worried about her marriage prospects in Canada, but would have found herself with plenty of suitors had she only lived. And another, not so young anymore, had a limp and a secret diary in her trunk detailing scandalous affairs drawn from her own naughty imagination.
Elizabeth realized halfway through that it would be bad luck to stop speculating and forced herself to continue: one was an amateur astronomer and was walking the deck when it happened; another was asleep in her second-class cabin, dreaming of a buttered roll. One of them just had a shot of whiskey and blamed her own drunkenness for the sudden strange angle of the ship’s floor.
“Most of them sleeping, poor souls,” Paris said, his own copy of the paper spread across the table before him. “Hard to fathom when a ship goes down.”
“Hard to fathom indeed!” Mother said. “Very good.”
“I know one thing for certain,” he continued. “I would have been up on deck with the first fog whistle, calling for the boats.” He tapped the image of eight bespoke men in a lifeboat. “I would have toiled to save the ladies in the lower classes, unlike these lads.”
“How could you have been up and down at once?” Elizabeth asked. She imagined the old French widow breaking away from her nurse as they waited for rescue and diving into the water, swimming an elegant crawl around Paris Singer as he read the British news alone in a trembling lifeboat.
“Don’t be so disgusted,” he said, turning the page.
“You don’t know what you would have done.”
“I can’t see a thing!” Mother shouted.
“At the very least, you could come sit with us, Dora.”
“I am happy by the window, thank you, Elizabeth. This room is overwarm.”
It was too warm to work indoors, and outside it wasn’t much better, humid without much of a breeze. On the lawn, Isadora and the girls were running back and forth in the garden. The large American meal had gone with Max, and Elizabeth missed the bacon most of all.
“Read it to me,” Mother called out. “It’s impossible to fathom from so many leagues!”
“Would you like to hear it in French?” Elizabeth asked.
“I’ll give you the basic facts,” Paris said, finding the paragraph. “‘Disaster has overtaken the fine Canadian Pacific liner Empress of Ireland, which sailed from et sea at et sea, was due to reach Liverpool et sea, first reported to have collided with an iceberg, later messages show the disaster was due to collision with the collier Storstad.’”
“An iceberg!” Mother said. “Imagine the rotten luck. You know, I considered the Canadian Pacific line but determined the White Star third class was finer. How close the calls can be sometimes.”
“It wasn’t an iceberg,” Elizabeth said. “You know, it was not a close call for many souls.”
“Shall I read you the list?” Paris asked. Elizabeth liked Paris on this trip and found him to be a useful friend to her.
“Read it to yourself,” Mother said. “Tell me if there is anyone on it from Oakland.”
“Toronto, Toronto, Winnepeg, London. A Japanese man. How far is Okinawa from Quebec, do you think?”
“Or San Francisco, thank you.”
“If anyone could align a tragedy to reflect themselves, Dora, it would be you.”
Mother gave a start, dropping her butter knife on the floor. “Be reasonable,” she said, reaching for a replacement from another place setting. “Why else would you read the papers in the morning but to work its lessons in relation to your own life? You can claim to pity the souls all you want, but you’re the one imagining the feel of the water around your own waist. I don’t know how I raised such selfish girls.”
“Selfish? I’ve devoted my life to my sister’s artistic movement. And if she was truly selfish, she wouldn’t be out there teaching six little girls to be wood nymphs.”
Mother arched an eyebrow. “I suppose you’ll always defend her.”
“I won’t,” Elizabeth said, hating the plaintive sound of her own voice. She noticed Paris laughing to himself, writing something in the margin beside the list of shipwreck dead. She hated them both intensely.
“The father of her child is a stranger to her,” she said. “The girls told me. Just so the both of you know.”
Mother took up a hard-boiled egg that had been rolling about her plate and cracked it with her butter knife as Paris turned the page to the financial news. They were quiet almost long enough for Elizabeth to feel bad.
“No news from Oakland?” Mother asked, after a while.
“Nothing from Oakland,” he said, “or San Francisco either.”
“You don’t mind, then?” Elizabeth asked, incredulous. “Neither of you mind?”
“You always were a hateful child,” Mother said.
“I’m merely relating facts to help you make the best decisions. She has spent so much energy playing you for sympathy or plying you for cash, and though you each have better places to be and better people to be with, you insist on standing beside her as she runs off with some strange Italian.” They looked down at their plates but she continued, emboldened by their shame. “What do you have to say for yourselves now? How will you justify this?”
A kiss on the cheek startled her, and though the arms thrown around her kept her from turning, she knew the grip and squeeze, the softness buoyed by solid bone, the smell of sweat and hair, of dark beer, and perfumed soap. “I didn’t mean it,” she said automatically.
“Who means anything,” Isadora said lightly, plucking a roll from the basket at the center of the table. She took a hearty bite and put the rest on Elizabeth’s plate. The others said good morning and she returned the sentiment sweetly, rubbing her sister’s shoulders and kissing the crown of her head.
“I’m glad the three of you are here so I can tell you at once,” she said. “We are having a special recital tonight for the movement, and I want you all to come. When the girls and I undertook this endeavor, it was with the plan that they would be dancing my work without my direct involvement on the stage. In essence, they would be having a conversation with me, but that I would not be able to answer in turn. This is the closest I have come to my own death. We would greatly appreciate notes from a thoughtful and supportive audience, and I cannot think of a more suitable trio than my mother, my lover, and my dear, darling sister.” She fondled Elizabeth’s hair where it was knotted at the nape of her neck.
“Eight sharp, in the hall,” Isadora said. “I’ve prepared brief remarks. And then afterward, the girls have requested ice cream and I thought it kind to oblige them. Do you mind?”
“I’ll make a note to the cook,” Paris said.
Mother worried the corner of the tablecloth between her fingers. “How can I help?” she asked.
“You just make sure to arrive on time. Perhaps Elizabeth can brush your hair. Would you, dear one?”
“Of course,” Elizabeth murmured.
Isadora kissed her sister’s cheek and straightened up again. “The Italian is called Romano,” she said. “I know him well.”
And then she was gone. The air returned to the room and flushed all their cheeks red, but Elizabeth found she couldn’t catch her breath. Paris rolled up the newspaper to swat at a fly. “This heat,” he said.
Isadora makes an introduction that naturally upsets all in attendance
They hired a stagehand to operate the new lights, but he seemed not to know quite how to do it. Elizabeth decided against going back to help. Paris brought a lantern into the dark hall, setting it at Mother’s feet like a glass-walled campfire as she went on about parties back home. She had insisted on having a set of orange
silk flowers pinned to her hair, which, in the low light, made her resemble a sea creature.
“The Colonel has the entire neighborhood over,” Mother said. “It’s mostly ladies and older couples these days. But he has the most wonderful side yard and garden, with room for long tables and a stage. His Civil War function is the greatest night of the year. Elias escorted me last year and we had such a wonderful evening.” She held a stack of loose pages on her lap featuring inarticulate sketches of the girls. “The Colonel has three or four tables set up with linens and silver, and he dresses his waiters in bonnie smocks. He has a few of them put on a show of plantation melodies, just the most charming music you’ll ever know, performed by the nicest people, all of them.”
“How droll,” Paris said, examining the wick on the lantern flame before taking up his drink again and returning to his seat.
“It sounds dreadful,” Elizabeth said.
“Listen to the little queen!” her mother said, tapping the lantern glass with her toe and casting shadows on herself. “Bored of a home-cooked meal.”
“Your friend dresses his servants up and makes them do a number at his charity functions. You don’t think it a little tacky?”
“The queen, the European! He doesn’t force them to do a thing, they’re as free as any of us. You obviously haven’t read any of my letters to you, but I am a progressive woman.” She busied herself violently with the little program the girls had made, which included their names and an abundance of biographical notes. “I hope I haven’t missed the whole season,” she said. “The Colonel was planning the greatest night of the year and I don’t have too many more of those to work with. Oh, I hope I can get back in time.”
“No time like the present,” Elizabeth said, picturing her mother’s progressive friends. She hated how heartily they all congratulated themselves on their own expired ideals. Max was a bit of an absolutist and had his cruelties, but in fifty years, people would be calling him progressive, not Mother’s old friends.