Isadora Page 10

  It was too bad Gus didn’t care for Max, as the two men had a lot in common. They both had tender hearts, for one, and in the way of tenderhearted men, they felt most comfortable delivering cruelties both egregious and mundane. Elizabeth remembered their first holiday in London, when the family sat down to Christmas breakfast to find that their special oranges had been stolen overnight. Their mother worried that a citrus-motivated thief had broken into the room until Gus admitted he had eaten them all at midnight while the rest of them were out caroling. Apparently, after making fun of the whole venture for hours, he was upset that nobody had invited him.

  Max was the same way. A sore loser at party games, he once interrupted a garden-party Ludo match by throwing a crystal goblet at a fountain with such force that its shards cast a wide and irretrievable arc, landing in planters and scalloped patches of sand, the force and range of his throw ensuring that there would be bits of his bad temper embedded in the landscape for generations. Their hosts insisted with an abundance of grace that they were glad to know his glittering hazard would become a permanent feature of their daily walk to the garden, for the shards might catch the light and remind them of the sea.

  Elizabeth gave a sharp sigh.

  “What’s that?” Gus asked.

  “I’ll check on dinner.”

  “Tell the cook that if she serves another consommé, I will set a fire in her room.”

  Elizabeth hoped Romano would be having coffee downstairs as he often was around this time. She thought again of Max, not quite her suitor after all these years, but certainly not her husband either. He had agreed a little too enthusiastically before she left for Greece that they should take the next few months to discover themselves more truly, addressing what that meant to their romantic or business partnership on the other side of her journey.

  And in truth, she found herself appreciating him more during her time away, despite her little distractions. Max’s fits and scenes were precisely what distinguished him from other men, with their invitations for afternoon strolls, their thin lips and wringing hands. The ordered depth of Max’s anger attracted her, a library’s worth of grievances organized in the heavy card catalog of his mind. His principles placed him in stark contrast with her family, who seemed not to have enough of an attention span between them to hold a grudge longer than an hour or two. Limp and elastic, bored by sport and usually drunk, they conspired to invent rifts with anyone foolish enough to wander into range and lost interest before the night was over. Isadora was the worst of them, a hissing flirt. She was ill at ease until she had inspired a row at any given party, stepping over the wreckage of another courtship or marriage as she picked her teeth with the lady’s comb. Isadora would hate Max if she ever cared enough to learn his name.

  Max tries to remember his first meeting with Elizabeth, eventually recalling an injury to his pride

  As a young man, Max liked to keep up with the cafés in the old town, placing a coin on the counter of the Landtmann or Central and finding a good seat, stroking his budding beard as he eavesdropped on men at nearby tables discussing the rational mind. For months he could only smile in the direction of their voices, eyes filled with envious tears.

  Finally, he’d gathered the courage to start a conversation with one of the men, at first so quietly that the words could not escape the glass lip of his coffee, half phrases bobbing in the overmilked sludge.

  He befriended the man, who eventually made a vague promise that in a few weeks he would take Max to an afternoon salon with the famous psychoanalyst, a party at which this man had a standing invitation. The man used his promise to Max as an excuse to speak often about the event, describing how brilliant scholars would roar through a series of posits in the center of the room, tugging passionately at their own hair as they thrilled the crowd. They were all in competition for the favor and praise of the famous analyst, who might reference offhand the greatest ideas of the evening in his closing improvisational speech, a subtle crowning that would follow the victors for the rest of the month. There was also supposedly a coffee cake so delicious that the whole afternoon ended with a genial sweetness and the combatants left as friends. The man reported all this in earnest. He would bring Max, of course, at the earliest available time, the next one for certain.

  Max took this to heart and cleared his meager schedule in the event his invitation might come without warning. He spent the morning of the salon—they were scheduled the first Tuesday of each month—pressing and then carefully rumpling his shirt collar and running expansive exercises on the piano to boost his confidence before practicing his diction and extended eye contact with the wary patrons of his father’s grocery.

  He quickly came to the unsettling realization that he didn’t actually have any ideas of his own, only Ben Franklin quotes memorized from his old copybook. He made it his daily work to find a point of view, eventually settling on the idea that physical strength could be linked to mental prowess and if an entire culture could take on a serious study of calisthenics and weight training, their minds would be prepared for a mastery of mathematics, science, and the higher arts. He worked through these ideas behind the counter at the grocery, and the ladies he rang up carried home their fish and eggs and prepared the evening meal thinking of the boy in the store who seemed so pale with longing they assumed he was lovesick, or perhaps he had been injured lifting something heavy; it didn’t seem that he could handle much. But they assumed it was weakness brought about by love and pitied the poor girl he was in love with.

  Every month at the appointed hour, Max arrived at the café to find his friend already there, dressed in the precise intellectual style: a long woolen coat in all seasons, with a watch pinned smartly to his vest, leather gloves clasped in one hand, and scholarly papers rolled in the other. Every time, his friend offered up an excuse for why he wouldn’t be able to bring Max with him that afternoon. First, the gathering was closed to extra guests; the next one had to be delayed for a holiday. Another was closed to men under forty, for they were discussing death, and the analyst didn’t care to hear what the young men had to say. The excuses were humiliating for Max, but his unreliable friend was the only hope he had of early entry into the scholarly set, so he took the rejection with a grim and patient smile.

  His invitation kept coming, along with the excuses: the meeting was canceled for weather, and then the coveted guest spot was given to another man visiting from Paris or London who had arrived unexpectedly on the evening train but would have to be accommodated, the implication of this unknown friend’s importance understood to all. Sometimes the visitor would actually be brought into the café and paraded before Max, as if to illustrate the bearing of a true scholar—his canvas-bound books, his uneven smile—and Max would be forced to shake his replacement’s hand, before he was left to the serious duty of filling an evening with nothing but time.

  One such evening, when the group was set to discuss the anal impulse in a closed session, Max had settled in for a long evening alone when he saw a woman on the other side of the café, sitting so poised with such a pleasantly blank demeanor he thought for a moment that he was looking at a mannequin in the window of the shop next door. But then the mannequin came alive, and he watched with wonder as she ordered a slice of cake with milk.

  Watching the lovely young woman was a nice distraction from the day’s disappointment. He felt his own awkwardness and wished he had learned to roll cigarettes—his old tobacco tin remained unopened as punishment and reminder—but the woman didn’t seem to notice him, seeming perfectly content without any distraction, not even a book or newspaper. When her dessert arrived, she ate with careful satisfaction, tipping her slight chin up to observe the framed pictures on the wall. There was something so peaceful about her, which transformed the café into something wholly different from the dull room it had become to Max. He found himself wanting to know her.

  He had been well trained by months of rejection at the hands of his friend, and his introduction in hindsig
ht was very straightforward. He took a seat without asking, demanded to know where she was from, and then guessed before she could respond that she was visiting from out of town.

  Somehow she found him charming despite his bad manners. She was in Vienna for the month with her sister, who until recently had been dancing with Loie Fuller. He learned that they were traveling artists and scholars in their own feminine way, and would he like to join the two of them for luncheon later that week? He would.

  The woman had a strange intensity that made him feel pleasantly observed. He guessed from her halting French that she was from Tulin, one of those lovely towns along the Danube, and he was heartily surprised when she corrected him to say she was from San Francisco, a city that brought to mind an image of a hot air balloon rising in a clear sky. Elizabeth was the first American he had ever met, and between her and Benjamin Franklin he got the idea that Americans were kind and industrious, thoughtful and serious; it wouldn’t be long before his opinion changed, but this first impression was like a thumbprint on warm dough.

  Elizabeth was a beautiful girl, as graceful as a reed in water, with thick dark hair secured at the nape of her neck. He loved how she dragged her left foot behind her like a reluctant guest, and he looked forward to the evening it would be appropriate for him to offer his arm. She would lean on him and right herself, and they would make a handsome couple walking down the sidewalk, which would have been recently doused by dishwater. A bit of washing soap would attach blithely to her dress. It would all be very nice.

  Max found himself thinking often about Elizabeth, and when it was time to leave home, he looked to her school for potential employ. That first evening also paved the way for their romantic life together, which he always appreciated for how it was built, on a communion of ideas. From the very start he knew that conversations with Elizabeth would give him more knowledge of the world than he would gain sitting at the feet of any famous thinker. Her thoughts were so plain to him, so easy to interpret. If she described a landscape, he could understand its nature in her simple description; she spoke about all of life in the same easy way, whether she was thinking about dinner or arguing for the necessity of physical affection. She lived in the world as a familiar guest. He could find in her life a rationale for his own. And that was how Max fell in love.

  Elizabeth spends the afternoon hiding from her family

  Though the hotel had been designed in the same grand European style as the city hall and various residences up and down the main street, the other buildings had been kept up and now stood proud over the hotel, which had long ago fallen into the disrepair standard to coastal towns. Elizabeth kept meaning to ask the owner about the building’s history but had been put off by his small dogs, who hurled themselves endlessly at birds in the courtyard despite the constant material presence of the door’s inlaid glass. The door suffered a shin-level smudge, and guests suffered the strangled sounds of the dogs’ desperate attempts to escape.

  A large kitchen down the hall operated in a constant state of minor chaos. From breakfast through supper, the kitchen supervisor leaned against a counter and repeated tasks to three women. He was a thin man and seemed not to have benefited much from their cooking. Elizabeth understood well, not benefiting much from it herself. Attempting the French method meant chucking their standard honey-drenched pastries in favor of scorched béchamel and the youngest cook’s attempt at macarons, which emerged from the oven dense as stones and leaked a marbled wet stain onto a porcelain tray while the girl went into the pantry to cry about it. The others pitied Elizabeth’s limp and allowed her to sit on a high stool by the open door, giving her napkins to fold. The youngest came back to practice her English as she stood by the stove and frothed an innocent bowl of eggs in preparation for some extravagant culinary failure.

  “How is your mother feeling today?” she asked, tapping her whisk on the bowl’s metal edge.

  “My sister, you mean.”

  “Yes, your sister.”

  “Mother is in California, and last I heard, she was not leaving her neighborhood.”

  The girl frowned. “Your mother?”

  “My sister is fine. They’re all fine, thank you.”

  “You are welcome.” They were very agreeable with each other in the way of two people without a common language. At the stove, the thin man lifted the lid to smell something bubbling and turned to scowl at one of the cooks.

  “A stew for dinner?” Elizabeth asked.

  The girl turned the eggs out into a bowl of dry goods. “Carrots, roast stew, leek,” she said. “Tomatoes consommé.”

  “Gus will be pleased.”

  “Augustin,” she said. “Isadora. The famous family.”

  Elizabeth wondered how long after Isadora’s death the school in Paris would be able to continue. She certainly couldn’t change the name and take it on herself as she had in Darmstadt; it would be a lesser copy no matter how much success she found. Perhaps they could keep Isadora’s name if they had her stuffed and propped up in a corner. If one in twenty mourning visitors signed up for a lesson, they could continue operation through the fall semester, and there would be extra revenue if the pilgrims left flowers fresh enough to be resold.

  “Where are you from?” Elizabeth asked, shifting her weight to lean against the counter, resting her back. They had been in residence one month already, but she had just thought to ask, at this rate she would never learn the woman’s name. She considered assigning her one.

  “Corfu, the island.”

  “But where were you born?”

  The woman pointed to her feet, as if she had been ejected from her mother’s womb right there on the tile.

  “You were born in the city?”

  “In Korkyra, yes.”

  “It’s very peaceful.”

  The woman shrugged.

  “Quiet, you know, very calm,” Elizabeth said. “I imagined a trade city when it was first described to me. Great ships going out with oils and spices. Maybe that’s Athens, though. There is a solace here in the beautiful secluded coves. We took a tour to the high point and looked out over the water, which was a blue I’ve never seen from any coast. I think it’s a quality of the light that imbues it. And then there’s the air, which feels freshly transported from Olympus. All of it offers a real meditation, a thoughtful feeling, you know. Peace is all of that. That’s what I meant when I said peaceful.”

  “I was not confused,” the woman said.

  “Oh.”

  They sat awhile in silence, Elizabeth tracing a line on the countertop where a piece of tile had cracked, following the line with her fingernail to the mortar. The woman certainly could have made it clear that she understood the first time. It was rude to make a guest feel foolish. She considered alerting the owner but then thought of the dogs clamoring over her dress.

  “Your style is very current,” the girl said, and Elizabeth realized she had been frowning down at her tunic. Isadora made her wear it to satisfy her own idea of Grecian authenticity. That was embarrassing enough, but then some of the women mistook the costumes as a fad from Paris and followed their lead. Soon enough, half the women in town were in short-sleeved tunics and sandals and the other half were deeply envious. It inspired an unmoored sensation, and the young soldiers who had begun to arrive from Serbia observed the classical maidens and surely felt as if they had tucked themselves into a greatcoat pocket of history, jostled around in time along with the scraps of varied revolutions and the philosophers’ lesser posits.

  The Italians filed in through the kitchen door, wool pants pulled over their swimming gear. Their arrival drew the subtle dismay of the cooks, who wordlessly moved their meat and produce to far counters as the men lined up for glasses of water, depositing their canteens in a sweating pile by the sink. Romano was among them, looking cool and dry. Elizabeth supposed that while the others swam, he had remained onshore, giving an intensive lecture on Garibaldi to a seabird.

  The kitchen supervisor had already begun to
clear his throat and advance, bowing slightly, gesturing at the food and at his watch, indicating everything still left to be done and the fleeting time they had in which to do it. The Italians accepted apples and decamped to the dining room. Elizabeth followed them out and sat with Romano as he opened his sketchbook.

  It was impossible to talk to Romano without two thousand years of sculptural art history serving as a tedious chaperone. Every topic was ushered into his mind past brooding men and Madonnas cast in the certain bronze of the era, under fleurs of classical frieze, horses and cherubs and birds in flight, until at last it reached the head office, at which point he would roll his eyes, deliver some pronouncement, and send it back down. His father’s sculptures—for his father was also a sculptor and apparently very well known in Italy—held court in his son’s mind and made for a talkative gallery. As a result, Romano always seemed distracted, burdened as he was with thoughts of men greater than himself. And women, she supposed, as well.

  “The light was fine today,” he said. “It seemed to melt a little around the point where the water met with the sand. Not at all like yesterday.”

  “It was too bright yesterday?”

  He grimaced. “Too flat.”

  “You sound like a painter.”

  His friends had set up a game of bridge in the dining room, relocating the silver and plates to another table. The thin man headed for the pantry, strangling a dish towel as he went.

  “How is the patient?” Romano asked.

  “Stronger every day.”

  “It’s funny,” he said. “I find myself afraid to bring her up, as if she’s a ghost I might invoke by speaking her name.”

  “How Shakesperean of you.” She thought of Hamlet moping around the castle for months before his father arrived. Perhaps the guards had set the whole thing up to bring a little excitement to Denmark.