by Amelia Gray
“The older girls say so.”
“You’ve been taking your cues from the older girls? That explains why you’re late to all your marks. What if the older girls told you to eat your slipper with gravy and bread?”
A few fat drops of summer rain begin to fall, marking their presence on the rail.
“Teacher Merz sent us a letter,” Irma says. “He says we should leave Europe at once. There is a conflict, he says.”
“Germany will soon be securing her place in the sun,” Erica says. “Teacher Merz says so. He wrote us all letters. Our mothers don’t want us to come home either.”
“Don’t you feel it?” Irma asks.
“I feel a storm coming that will ruin our day, but I can use my eyes and ears for that. You shouldn’t accept any letters from Teacher Merz. He is only trying to tease you.”
“Look!” Margot cries, pointing. “Down there! They’re taking away the flag!” She dissolves into hysterical tears, burying her face in my dress.
Across the river, two workers are taking down the decorations that had been strung up for Bastille Day. One of the men scales the lamp to undo the knots up top while the other waits on the ground with a basket.
“You should come with us to New York,” Irma says.
Margot sobs, clutching me. “Won’t you come with us, Mother?” she sobs. “Won’t you?”
“Now see, you’ve worked Margot into a frenzy.” I crouch down, bracing against the rail. “It’s nothing,” I tell her, holding her close and kissing the tears from her face. “Do you want to know what you’re really feeling, my darling? Look at me. It’s not any kind of war. Stop crying, and I’ll tell you what it is.”
She wipes her face with the tail of her sash like a lost orphan in one of Deirdre’s little books. They are all orphans, their own mothers pushing them from the nest.
“What is it?” she asks, sniffling.
“What you’re feeling, my darling, are the first drumbeats of the artistic revolution, and you and I and your sisters here are the ones leading it. It’s the sound of change, you know. Change can be a scary thing, and sometimes feels as if it’s spinning just out of your grasp. Do you understand? That’s what gives you a bad feeling. You hold the future inside you. Soon enough this glorious new movement will arrive, casting light onto everything it touches. It will sink its teeth into you and eat you up, and you will become a part of it, just as it now is a part of you. There now, don’t cry. You will be carried by a familiar beast, and your reward will be a yearning that will die with you and a legacy you won’t be here to enjoy.”
Margot weeps more earnestly than before. Irma gives me a dirty look as they take her inside, but the rest of them seem lost in thought. It’s best they all learn now what lies at the end of this path. The more they know to dread, the less they have to fear.
30 July 1914
Romanelli
cura di Viareggio
I know there is no connection between us, subtle or otherwise. Though I trusted my desire would find its way to you somehow, it was only rolling from ear to ear in my own head. Still, I need to share the truth of things with you. You’ll wonder over this letter most seriously, I’m sure, as it will be the first you’ve heard from me since our last morning on Corfu, but as you wonder, know this: I hope you are well. Ever so.
Before the girls and I left for the train, I brought Isadora a gift. We’ve never much cared for birthdays, and Christmas has always been eaten up with preparations for holiday shows. But when I saw it in the shopwindow, I couldn’t help myself.
I left it in a box at the foot of her bed while she was sleeping. She’s never liked to say goodbye and will fight anyone who shows her kindness, and so it is best this way. When she wakes up she’ll find it: a scarf as red as the blood between us and long enough to wrap her and baby both. If she tied it at her neck it would unfurl like a banner behind her, reading Sans limites! or Je vais à la gloire!—I couldn’t guess, as her whims change by the hour.
She thinks that her suffering will be rewarded with glory, that joy and pain will be balanced on a scale the size of her life, but she’s wrong. Happiness is not earned. We fall on it like drunks, then pick ourselves up and stumble away, looking for all the world like we’re dancing.
In Bellevue, a child is born
I’m afforded a good view of the mobilization from the balcony where we all stood just a few weeks ago. A line of men cross the length of the bridge, waiting to sign the transport roster. The men are flanked by glinting silver cavalry and autobuses stretching around the bend. If the girls were here, we would bring the men flowers and dance for them. But the girls are gone. This whole time I thought a new era was building; now I see it was only a war.
Watching the first buses pull away, I feel a thin internal stretching followed by the sound and sense of a cracking knuckle as a thin stream of water trickles down one leg. I wait as long as the pain allows before I ring the bell and the child waits patiently with me, having one last word with the universe; the same conversation we all had, which vanished the moment each of us was born.
Once I ring the bell, two white-capped nurses come running from some recess of the house. They wheel a hospital bed right into the center of the dusty ballroom and set to preparing it without comment. How they got it to the fourth floor in the first place is a mystery to me. Paris spoke of the bed’s expense, so I’m disappointed to find it’s only a padded metal table glorified with levers and cranks and a pair of white cloth restraints affixed for the obstinate, and a length of white muslin sufficing a cushion, the whole thing on casters. Terrifically advanced, I’m sure. The nurses bring in trays of silver tools, a pair of high chairs, and a white enameled bucket, all of it looking as if it fell this morning from the surface of the moon.
The doctor enters, pulling on his white coat. My medical staff has gotten accustomed to pinochle and late nights in their guest rooms and seem annoyed that they must get back to work. One of the nurses unfolds a white linen shade to protect the privacy of the bed from the ghosts that roam in the building while the other tries to coax me from the window. I press my wet forehead to the glass, trying to find the river in the activity around it, the men and horses, the dust they raise. I wish I could see to England; Paris sent a picture postcard of the Paignton Pier with a colorful caption in his script—WISH YOU WERE PIER—and the girls’ names signed like an attendance roster underneath. My darling girls! Life is such a sparkling thing, and their toes have only just touched the water.
The nurse goes to get me a seltzer in exchange for my obedience, and I have just enough time to make a sad farewell to my body. Holding the window frame, I point my left toe and describe a circle, as soft as a breath, to the wall, then float it up and back, hips wound to strangling. I focus steady on my pain until it bows to me.
They guide me to the bed, which has been lifted to its highest point, forcing me to heft myself up. A series of needles are presented with great aplomb, but the one I pick seems too large for my vein. By the time the nurse is finished, she may as well have attached a button. She goes to work on my undercarriage, pulling off my wet bloomers. I remark to the doctor that the child has been baptized already in his own water, but the man doesn’t have a thing to say in response. He cleans his glasses, the way Gus does, while the nurse makes endless slight adjustments to my body, swabbing my skin and pinning my clothes, binding my legs to the stirrups and draping a sheet over it all, as if my lower half is a table on which the doctor has been invited to dine.
The other nurse returns with the seltzer. She places it on a pedestal just out of reach, and I can only watch with helpless desire as its lemon sinks to the bottom of the glass and bubbles back up. The doctor affixes a cotton sling over his mouth and nose.
A rumbling on the street startles everyone. One of the nurses goes to the window and returns saying, “C’est la guerre,” as if the war were a man outside with his hat in his hands, waiting for us to be done.
The doctor ducks under the she
et and says something I can’t quite hear through his mask. Before I can ask him to repeat himself, the old ignoble pain rips through. This time it won’t be bowing to me.
Pain can claim so many pounds of happy flesh, and still it keeps coming, spiked and serpentine. The doctor’s muffled “Courage, Madame” rises from between my legs, and his words become a set of waves I can duck under and swim. Tongs and forceps sink around me, spitting bubbles in their wake.
The doctor rests a moment against my leg. His forehead fits on the ball of my knee, which becomes a joint lubricated by our sweat. The nurses assure me when I cry and call out for Paris that the city is with me now.
Pain is a landscape. They have spread me out like a picnic, with iced drinks and sandwiches, cheese plated on paper, the nurses tucking into fruits and bread while the doctor jabs inelegantly in the crook of a nearby tree. One of the girls has lovely red hair, which I wind around my fingers as we walk, finding a pond tucked among the high reeds and sitting down together to watch full life-and-death spans of foreign creatures. She tells me stories of childhood in this country, where she was raised to always trust that if she did her best to be a good and ordinary girl, she would have a good and ordinary life, that if bad days came, she would weather them knowing that things would go back to normal soon enough. In living like this, she found that the bad days became ordinary in their way and in hindsight seemed not so bad after all, and eventually those bad days came to be the most natural course.
She tells me all this with her head nestled in my lap, raising her voice to be heard above the sound of a transport train picking up speed, every car packed with boys. The engine man squints at the track, but with the dust still settling from the last train, it’s impossible to see ahead.
Either another doctor has arrived or the first one has taken on the expression of an entirely different man. This new man is more serious and upright, frowning from one side, as if his face were painted on a half-drawn curtain. He removes his mask and speaks to the nurses in a regional French so rapid that his meaning is lost on them both; they call to mind a pair of ducks, one and then the other bobbing under the sheet to have a look. His second round of commands sends them running for strange objects, ornaments and goose feathers and rum. There are more of them all of a sudden, the women tripling to complete their tasks. One of them rolls a thin glass cylinder from its place in the corner, but when I try to turn and follow her progress, another pair of hands holds my head away. I warn the first that she’ll need a broom if it breaks, though I can’t think of where to find one. One nurse pinches my cheeks hard and runs away before I catch her. Another plunges a spoon into a slouching bag and pulls out soft gray ash, packing the wound the man has sliced between my legs. Another plays a madhouse tune on a toy piano, rolling a ball of yarn between her stocking feet.
These are my girls, I realize, my dancing darlings. The real nurses must be tied up in the pantry, kicking at the door. You naughty girls! They wink and laugh. There’s nothing to it, one of them says, and another says The war! The war! A fist pounds against a metal door. One siphons a bottle of rum into my ear. My hands are caught in metal cuffs; the knocking is my head against the table.
The doctor taps my tender sex with a pair of forceps to show me where I need to tense myself, but fatigue keeps me from knowing the muscle to order it into action. I bear down with all my might. My heel slips the stirrup and jackknifes into a nurse, a hard kick to her breastbone. She holds her chest with two hands, leveling her full scorn and hatred at me, as strong as ten thousand good wishes; she will read news of my death years from now and have a second serving of cake.
Of course my own body would keep me from delivering this child. Of course I would die here after a life spent learning the personality of every muscle. The body is all that fails me here, and all that saves me as well. There is no white light, no kind eyes, no angels here to bow their heads. Pain is a man in the room. The mind slips its bounding rail, and time steps aside to watch it fall. Only the body remains, failing and riding through failure.
The nurse I kicked reels back into a tray and sends the cart on casters spinning, its silver crashing across the room, a sea of scalpels and forceps and fine-tooth saws, silver-plated speculums and pins and long-eyed embroidery needles and shaving blades and steak knives, sharps tossing to bed themselves into skin and soft wood, the nurses crawling to escape with needles in their hair. The one I kicked got the worst of it; clean red blood seeps from her leg, sliced neatly mid-thigh by surgical steel, her stocking slick with blood, both nurses screaming to see it as the baby, with no better fanfare than total disaster, falls into the doctor’s hands.
The doctor catches the slick body around his head and waist and holds him steady through the struggle of his stretching arms. This one is too young to go to war! We need to be ready when the enlistment man comes. Too young! My boy’s eyes are wetly sealed, he hasn’t seen a bit of this world. Send the enlistment man away, keep my child close for all my days so that no matter where life takes him, he will be near. If he goes to war, he takes me with him.
The doctor licks his thumb and swipes the baby’s face to clear the blood. He hands him to me and crouches beside the screaming nurse, leaving a bloody print on her cheek when he slaps it. Her eyes roll back as she faints and the other two carry her away. The afternoon has gone with them, and the men onto their buses, and the sun sinks past the tree-line. My child and I are alone.
The cord still connects us, its use to him fading. He struggles on my chest, seeming troubled by the fact that the material that warmed and held him is swiftly chilling to a sludge.
But the blanket doesn’t soothe him. He tenses and grasps, twisting sightless in my arms like a bisected worm. His hands ball into two fists and then stretch wide, and either he is silent or the world has become silent in witness.
I pull my tunic down and hold him against me. He is as weak as an old drunk and beats my breast with his tiny fists, rearing back and bucking his head. His skin seems stretched over a wire frame.
“Mamma’s here,” I say. “Hush now, I’m here.”
He goes still when he hears my voice, then lifts his tremulous head.
“That’s right, darling.”
One of his eyes unseals and then the other. He stares at me with two black and boundless pools. They gleam in the fading light.
Transfixed, the last strength of my body draws him closer. “Who are you?” I whisper into his perfect ear. “Who are you, Deirdre or Patrick? You have returned to me—”
I bring him close enough for our lashes to tangle. The whole world rests in his endless eyes.
He strains to speak, and I ache to hear, but when he opens his mouth, I see that his throat is closed off, and no air can come or go. It is sealed like a tomb by skin as soft as lambskin leather. His perfect throat winnows to nothing, his lungs twin thumbprints of contorted flesh. When I try to push my thumb to break the skin that seals his throat, he jerks away. The place is malformed and strung with nerves. I feel it too, for his pain is mine.
He seizes, overcome. Our eyes meet again, and I see that he knows me as I know him. I see Patrick’s energy and Deirdre’s attention, the pride of their fathers. I see my mother’s love and my father’s, Elizabeth and my brothers. He has my very own will to live, beating his fists against life itself. And then there are parts of him I don’t recognize—a peace wholly foreign to me, and courage I have never known.
His love is a gleaming thing. His eyes, the endpoint of a dark wire connecting him to the universe. He knows the past and future, it is etched onto his bones. I fear him, this germ of the world, but he fears nothing, not joy or pain. His body relaxes as he rests his head on my breast, so gentle, and dies.
In the blue light of evening I feel every agony of my life compounded: the pinch of a door, a stinging slap, blisters and jammed toes. An arm broken ice-skating, scalding drops of cooking oil. The children drown again and again. His body in my arms is the color of an oyster’s shell, his temple
smooth against my lips.
The world at last has burst me. My bones are winched apart, and from every porous place streams a triple fountain of blood and tears and milk. The three rivers drain and pool onto the floor.
My life has been staged for all to see, with no wings in which to wait and not a moment of rest. It is a performance of a lifetime. And though I thought I was alone, my audience was with me all along.
Men and women line the walls in silent witness. They are naked, without a stitch to cover them, and I see all shades of human skin, a statuary of the young and very old. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they form a line of flesh, a gapless human wall. Before I can speak to greet them, they come forward together as a wave and pull away my robe and tunic, leaving me as naked as the rest.
They were with me all along! They look at me with love, as if I am not plagued by the dead. They hold their hands on me, and I reach to hold them back, to touch their thighs and paunching breasts, their speckled necks, their pocks and puckers, swollen lips and hips, all of them thrumming with life. They are my body, I am their dark heart beating, and all of us are naked as the day we came screaming into this world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks are owed to Emily Bell and the whole team at FSG, including Debra Helfand, Rachel Weinick, Abby Kagan, Maxine Bartow, Na Kim, Sarita Varma, Maya Binyam, and Jackson Howard; to Claudia Ballard and the team at WME, including Laura Bonner and Caitlin Landuyt; to those who offered thoughts on portions of the draft, including Summer Block, Steph Cha, Maggie Evans McGuinness, Sasha Fletcher, Susan Quesal, Lee Shipman, and Timothy Small; and to Ashley Warren for archival research.
A number of texts helped to support this novel, most notably Charles Emmerson’s book 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War and Peter Kurth’s Isadora: A Sensational Life. Special thanks are owed to Mary Sano and her Studio of Duncan Dancing in San Francisco, which keeps Isadora’s method alive with a great sensitivity and devotion, and gladly offers lessons even to the gawkish.