Isadora Read online

  “I’m here now regardless,” he says. “And you’ll come back with me to the city if you know what’s best.” The shadow man edges slightly toward the window, his eye bulging as if it were being subtly inflated.

  “I would rather throw myself into the strait than return to some depressing play at life.”

  “I came all this way for quite a cold welcome, then.” His broad attempt at guilt doesn’t fool me for a moment. Likely he scheduled this trip to fall between a trip to the coast and the dedication of a factory. Factories must be so dedicated these days, with all the work they do!

  He sighs and goes into his bag, as if my attitude has forced him to do this. Finding a letter, he tosses it onto the foot of the bed, and I have to draw my own aching body forward to reach it. It’s marked from Berlin, from Harry Kessler, Ted’s patron.

  “I thought you might like to have it,” he said.

  “And you already opened it, of course.”

  “It was addressed to both of us.”

  “Declaring love and fidelity on behalf of Teddy, I’m sure.”

  He’s really sick of me now. “Stranger things have come in the evening post.”

  It is impossible even to begin reading the perfunctory lines. Everyone seems to have taken these messages as an excuse to display their calligraphy lessons, assuming their little notes will be preserved in my archive. True sentiment is hard enough without all the fussy stags and whorls of fine penmanship, and most people can’t be bothered. Harry’s cardstock is so thick that I have to lay it flat to rip it in half.

  Paris watches me do it. “That’s all then,” he says, gathering his things. His shadow cowers. “I come to find your family beleaguering the Greeks, running up an outrageous tab you have no intention of paying—”

  “Excuse me, we have every intention—”

  “—and you haven’t thought to ask me how I’m getting along.”

  “But I can see exactly how you are, Paris! You’re working out my concert dates for fall.”

  “You may prefer to own this entire tragedy,” he sneers, “but I’d like to remind you I was there for it, too.”

  “You mean for the funeral? We didn’t see much of you at the flat, except for when you came home drunk.”

  The shadow man unhinges his jaw, and a sound emerges like a runaway train bearing down on the room. Paris has always had the power to cut me down, and now he has plenty reason. I am an unarmored creature, as soft as gelatin, with just a few poison spikes in my arsenal, but I will deploy them if I must.

  “Perhaps you could console yourself with your more legitimate children,” I say, the words flying like slipped brakes, the steward leaping for a grassy bank. “Or you could go lie in your precious family crypt and discuss the subject with your mother.” The cars bear down and ram through the wall, scattering clapboard and glass, books and plates and wooden dolls soaring into the open air.

  “I believe we are done here,” he says.

  “Go on then, get out.”

  He picks through the wreckage in search of his dignity, lifting his hat from where it landed on a pile of crushed metal. The shadow man follows him out.

  With the both of them gone at last, the quiet morning returns. I can look forward to many hours of contemplation about how perfectly shaped grief is as a private venture, how melancholy can be played for an audience, but true grief should be guarded and held close. Grief is the only hope for the poor soul flailing in water, the only stone the body can hold that might have the weight to sink it.

  Elizabeth remembers her triumphant return to New York in 1899, after her first unlucky months in Europe

  Even with the unpleasantries of ocean travel—the disorienting motion in windowless quarters that made her feel as if she were stowed away in the inner ear of a swimming giant—it was hard for Elizabeth to ignore a particularly buoyant feeling of optimism. The ship on its second passage smelled of paint and fresh-stained wood, and the oiled deck gleamed as bright as the jaunty stacks. Even the dishes in the dining hall were perfect, every plate and saucer bearing the name Oceanic between a pair of hairline blue rows.

  She was in steerage with three Celt girls who were traveling to pursue life in America. The girls were twenty years old and new to the open sea and spent every night green-gilled and moaning as the ship rocked itself to sleep. When a sailboat rolls on the waves, you see yourself as an object on the waves. When the ocean liner does the same, however, it’s as if the whole world is tipping from its axis and the rest of your life will have to continue on this horrible canted course. The gut is the last to adjust, aligned longingly with the old horizon while the rest of you hangs onto a rail for balance.

  Elizabeth relished the chance to travel without her family. Isadora had always been the mallard topping their chevron, and they were all ducky in her wake, but they were in London not two weeks before it became clear that beyond Isadora’s little lecture tour on the function of art—which she had surely booked on the basis of being twenty-one years old and so charmingly preoccupied with Nietzsche that the audience had to restrain themselves from running up to pinch her cheeks—there was no work lined up and no contacts to speak of either. Mother and the boys were fine going along with it, being optimistic and easily fooled. They would all go from theater to theater, begging to put on a matinee show. Eventually the shame of it wore Elizabeth down, along with the helpless sense that Isadora was their only hope for success.

  In London, she had nightmares of the cattle boat that brought them to Europe. Every night she was forced to remember how they suffered on soiled bedrolls over a hundred quailing beasts, hooves like plug iron slamming against one another as the animals screamed in fear and agony, terrible human screams. Every morning the deckhands pulled at least one broken-necked milch cow from her pen and hung her from a boom over the water, skinning her before dropping the denuded carcass into the sea.

  She remembered the sad end of the largest steer, who had spent the last days of his life in a horrible state. He kept mounting the poor lowing cows, killing three of them with his violence, but he was allowed to remain general in the pen because there was no room to move him. The Duncans were trapped right beside him for days, separated by a few thin planks. They watched the carnage unfold, weakened by simple witness, by the sight and sound of death and the river of blood flowing from the wounds he opened on the backs of his hapless mates. At last the doomed thing kicked a supporting beam and took down the deck above, crushing himself and ten cows and breaking the leg of a sailor who had sworn that very morning over breakfast that this was his last cattle trip. In the rubble, the man was filled with such fury at the situation that he found the trapped steer, bowed his head over it, and took a savage bite out of the animal’s neck. Elizabeth would never forget his wild eyes when he reared back, chewing as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks, fresh gore blooming down his neck.

  It took the rest of the day to dump the dead animals from under the fallen deck. They had amassed the sea’s population of sharks following in a carnivorous mass. Isadora had insisted again and again that bovine ghosts were following the ship as well, until Mother told her to shut up, and pointed out that if there truly were ghosts, they would scatter to haunt the city once they arrived in port.

  Elizabeth believed there was something to her sister’s eerie observation. One thing was clear: they had built up enough bad luck to keep them from ever finding steady employment in London. They failed to find work in performance, public or private instruction, or mending, although they didn’t try very hard for the mending, as nobody but Gus was very patient and he didn’t have the tactile skill. They failed to draw notice dancing on the street, invisible next to buskers who used tricks and animals to hide their own inexperience. After dinner, Mother went to the corner below their room—once they finally found a room, its own sad story—and asked well-heeled men on the street if they might bring their daughters in for an afternoon lesson, remarking with her usual mix of prescience and delusion that one of her gir
ls would one day be quite famous and would command performances in the great cities of the world as a beloved inventor and curator of her craft and the other one was also very sweet. It was lucky enough that she wasn’t thrown into jail on any given night for her solicitation, but it seemed the men only pitied her.

  Mother liked to look the part of a lady even when she played it less convincingly, such as when Father left for good and she screamed threats and accusations to his receding frame, clutching their children to her skirts and inspiring in them a mutual wail that alerted the neighbors but inspired no sympathy from its intended target, who was only meaning to escape criminal debt as efficiently as possible and would be a dead man soon enough without anyone’s help. Elizabeth had to push the thought away; speaking ill of the dead was a low act and could turn luck away.

  This interest in luck was her only souvenir from Europe, and she pinned it to her heart. Before she needed fortune so desperately, she would never have guessed at all the things she could do to alter the odds: touching the left hand of a child could bring in money, for example, while rolling a spearmint leaf between cheek and jaw usually worked to conjure up a hot meal. She discovered the trick with the spearmint on their third week of stale biscuits; if she had only known, she would have plucked the plant bare weeks prior.

  Ultimately, it was a way for Elizabeth to protect herself. She couldn’t bear to think that the inattentive eyes of fate—or worse, her sister’s freewheeling whims—might control the family’s destiny and her own. So she did small things when the thought occurred. She thanked the butcher while focusing on the number twenty-four and walked quickly past financial institutions, ignoring their front door and repeating her mother’s maiden name. She skipped the third step on rainy days in favor of the second and fourth. It was important to perform every superstitious act that came to mind; each premonition was surely placed there for a reason and so deserved her attention and respect.

  Her strategy had reaped some small reward, for though cattle saw her to Europe, the fresh sheets of steerage would carry her home. She had been wise to keep in touch with the ladies whose daughters she had taught in New York, sending long letters with dark and dramatic retellings of their adventures and hinting politely at the trouble they continued to endure, her idea being that one of the ladies might see fit to write a cheque in the name of old friends. Before long, she was shocked to learn that her favorite of them had been moved to tears by her story of hardship and was offering to wire return passage and set Elizabeth up in the maid’s quarters to teach her five daughters again. The girls had been remiss in their training and were turning wayward; if Elizabeth would consider returning, she would be rewarded handsomely indeed. The letter arrived while they were living above a printing house that gave her those terrible nightmares of the cattle boat every time she managed to fall asleep, so the choice was clear. Isadora only protested to remark that Elizabeth gave up too easily, but relented on the grounds that her sister would be teaching the Method, which meant they would be diversifying on two coasts.

  It was a soothing thing to say that hardship made her stronger, but she wondered if it were true. The Celt girls were so gentle with one another, so open with their laughter and tears. Elizabeth would look in the mirror each morning and try to smile as those girls did, but she could not even approximate it.

  She returned again and again to the question as they drew closer toward New York’s hearty three meals a day. If her goal was an innocence in expression, it would be better to take nothing from heartbreak or horror but the knowledge and ability to avoid those routes in the future. A horse dying in the street did nothing to enhance her experience of a waltz. Isadora felt differently, and would rather fall to her knees, rub her face in the slab of its shuddering hide, and call it an orgastic experience of death in the midst of life, but it was a dead horse in truth, and as it became a sodden pile of grist under traffic, it served only to muddle the potential for the pure expression of ideas such as joy and faith, gumming those bright concepts up with such a palette of bleak shades that no light could struggle through.

  Perhaps it was only a function of her personality. Elizabeth hated her own good memory, which dogged her with sentimental images. She was nothing like her sister, who could gather herself up from any corpse and ask about supper, and in the same way find in congress with friends and lovers a fleeting glimpse of life’s pure energy or whatever she wanted to ascribe to that moment, but then was able to discard the entire exchange like a pair of ruined slippers on her walk home from the party. There was a way Isadora had of engaging on levels spiritual and emotional and physical all at once and then pushing aside the entire interaction as if it meant nothing to her. Meanwhile, Elizabeth was dull and forgettable with men and women both and then agonized over those stilted interactions for months.

  There she was, making slow passage back to the city that had thrown every impulsive terror at her and etched them into her memory. At least the passage was fine. The Oceanic boasted a dining hall with chairs rather than hard benches, serviceable biscuits with every meal. She might have gotten second class out of her patroness if she hadn’t spoken in such detail of the low life to which she had become accustomed in London, but she also might not have return passage at all; anyway it wasn’t so bad, the biscuits soaked in tea, plenty of time to think on the details of the new school, and the Celts were sweet and plaited her hair. The Oceanic found steadier days, and they eventually caught a favorable wind, all of it a sign of how simple things could be, for the smart and good, for the lucky.

  15 June 1913

  Teatro della Pergola

  Ted Craig, Direttore, cavoli riscaldati

  Non troppo avanti, Firenze

  Feeling a little better here in Greece and not a moment too soon, as our bill is only paid through the week and they’d like very much to open the rooms for the high season. Gus has passage booked to South America; he’s acting out of stubbornness now, having heard that none of us thought he would actually go. He still wants me to join him, but I believe I’ll stay in the region. Raymond and his wife are calling me to Albania, which is closer than Peru, quieter than Paris, and cheaper living too. I’ll be away for a while from the common post, but before I packed my cards I thought I would write.

  You have done much work with the myth of Orpheus adventuring into the Underworld to save Eurydice. I would like to present an alternative story to appear in your program notes:

  EURYDICE—

  Who was well acquainted with the Underworld and had begun even to see its charms, such as the soothing human groan from the lake of the damned and the bleeding walls cool against her face. Her hosts brought her pomegranate seeds and allowed her to sit sometimes on their dark thrones, which were comfortably warm, heated from lower floors. She and Persephone found they had so much in common, both of them happier alone than in company, both frolic-shamed and made to feel small. They both spoke of the world above as a tedious play they were happy to escape halfway through, its dramas a distant memory.

  All to say Eurydice was thriving, and though she knew it would happen, her heart still sank when Orpheus arrived. He stood before her in his robes from the last time she saw him, as if he couldn’t be bothered to change. The garlands he brought her withered as he approached, dry petals dropping to scatter.

  She had rehearsed her refusal for months, but the Moirai compelled it to slip her mind, and even though her friends and lesser demons wept and tried to hold her back, she agreed to follow him up to the surface again; to life, which had gone on without her.

  The two of them began the journey at once. She tried to soothe herself by studying him, and mirrored in her motion his slow-lifting foot, muscles in the standing leg made to support and span the other, touching toe before heel to the black sand, his foot’s powerful arch soaring the length of his step. The strength of the living was already a mystery to her; the dead hardly move, not seeing the point.

  Her reluctance mounted as his steps fell slower and sl
ower; she watched them, shivering already against the cold wind made to feel colder by the comfortable heat at her back. The morning light burned her eyes as they passed the virtuous pagans, and she knew they were almost there.

  But then a miracle happened. He came to a stop at the step that would bring them into the light for good. It was a blessing she couldn’t have ordered up more perfectly herself, a moment of grace. Some goddess smiled upon her when Orpheus stopped and turned around.

  She couldn’t believe it. He was silhouetted by the light behind him, and at first she wasn’t sure. Only his howling sorrow confirmed the curse was broken. They were close enough to touch, but would never touch again. She was surprised to see the agony in his eyes. The look on his face, how he hated her! It had all become clear at just the right time.

  Damned forever, she felt herself relax. There was nothing Eurydice feared so much as life’s dull potential, and now it was gone forever. She laughed, despite herself, as the goddesses of violent death dragged her down, his face fading into the senseless light of the living. The truth of it became clear to her as she lost sight of her beloved: the Underworld would be her only home until the end of time. She wept at the thought. She simply couldn’t believe her luck.

  On their final morning on Corfu, the lover witnesses a dream

  The sun cut across the blanket, soaking the wood in beams. A fat housefly fell through the open window and tangled itself in the curtain for a moment before going out again. Romano, watching from the bed, felt keenly sick for home.