Isadora Read online

  The two of them had most of the day before the ferry arrived. They would take it together, parting ways in Italy. Romano regretted not having the chance to spend much time with Isadora, but Elizabeth had made it clear that he would have to choose one or the other. He only wanted to sketch the dancer. Isadora had a classical figure, it was a singular opportunity. But he relented, not caring enough to make it an argument.

  The trip was a success overall. He was grateful to have met Elizabeth and passed a few evenings with her, time spent pleasantly for them both. He listened to her sleeping talk, stroking her thigh as she repeated, again and again, I hate her, I hate her, I hate her.

  II

  On a mail ship en route to Constantinople, gateway to the Holy Land, a ferry bears mail, rust, Isadora, and her sister-in-law

  On closer observation, the opportunity for which has been ample in close quarters, I discover that Penelope is a plain woman. She’s sweet enough, and a capable translator, but her stubborn shyness has kept us away from the other passengers, and she seems perfectly content playing endless card games and having no fun at all.

  The trip to Turkey was her idea. Her brother in the Samsun Province is retiring from military service and dramatically requests one last visit before he dies, despite the fact that he’s not quite forty years old. She promises to write me later on and tell me if he was ill or only joking.

  The Dardanelles offer up a steady scene, featuring minor forts, low hills and brush flanking antiquity Troy. We watch it pass, the motor of the ferry we’ve named Hippocampus chuggling mildly along. The children are safe in their box, which I carry now in my lap just in case there’s a leak below deck. We had some trouble in Albania when one of the men carrying my bags thought there was food in the biscuit tin and made to pry it open. I traded Penelope the old tin for a lovely little carved wooden box made to resemble a book. It was less conspicuous among the hungry, so nobody would bother me and I could eat in peace.

  Penelope brought the cards, an oversized set. When we play rummy, she invents stories for face cards—the queen’s dogwood lover, the traitorous prince—and it’s easy to tell her hand by her expression. I would insist we play for money if she wasn’t already financing the trip. “When you’ve seen one coast, you’ve seen every coast,” she says, discarding.

  “That’s not true. Look there,” I say, pointing at a grove of olive trees where a woman wraps a wide bolt of mesh around the trunks, securing them with thick black ribbons. “Every coast is new, and we are made new in witness, and so we find them infinite and within them our own multitudes.”

  We sit in silence, and I try to excise from my mind an image of her reading a book on local politics while Raymond makes elegant love to her.

  “Fair enough,” she says.

  The southern bank has been close all day, and earlier we witnessed a vague but strident celebration near Chanak. On the captain’s orders our charming young first mate inquired after it, speaking with a drunk in a pleasure skiff who was lighting Catherine wheels and throwing them overboard, where they immediately extinguished in the water and sank. The drunk reported that the Bulgarians pulled out of Adrianople and the men were returning to celebrate.

  It lifted spirits on our barge. The captain had been eager to leave Albania that week over a bad business deal. He sailed despite the skirmishes to the west, and it was clear he planned to claim much bravery through the strait, though we haven’t seen any soldiers, and the most dramatic moment came when he spilled a bit of garum on his trousers, making him smell for the rest of the trip as if he slept on the docks. Bravery made for a better story. After the news was relayed, the captain and his mate embraced, pounding one another on the back, gazing to the far shore and peerless victory beyond.

  Penelope was less pleased, though she tried to put it on Raymond. My brother is the kind of man who throws his weight against his own uneducated speculation, claiming his gut has some desire larger than lunch. It drives him to lose spectacularly in games of chance, but in times when the real world goes against his romantic ideal, as in the case with his protracted engagement with the refugees in Albania, he can usually rely on a kind of righteous momentum to carry him through until too much peace and prosperity dampens his spirit.

  In Albania, Raymond and Penelope wore their tunic and sandals every day and misinterpreted everyone’s discomfort as deference. When the Albanian men refused to band together under his guidance and build a symbolic temple to Hera, he turned to their women, ordering Penelope to give them some industry. Together they installed thirty women weaving for show and creating a passable product, the tapestries selling for a few times the local rate to traders who appreciated the unique sentiment behind the work over its quality. Every rug and runner came from women so eager to earn money for a hard loaf of bread that they didn’t fight Raymond’s claim that this new style would be useful in a broader sense, an investment in the same genre as studying a language or taking an extended trip to a foreign country and staying just long enough that the narrow roads would feel as plain as home—which was precisely what the women were already doing, of course, though not by choice, working long days, their mothers’ rings sewn into their clothes. And Raymond sold them the bread.

  In their tent, set back twenty meters or so from the beach, Penelope kept a waterproof travel case for her books. Most were either translation texts or unbearable allegories on the responsibility women have to their husbands told in the hazy context of literature, but under those she kept a few slim volumes from the dark philosophers, including a worn copy of the Dionysian-Dithyrambs in German. From the tent I could see Corfu across the strait and missed my sickbed there. Penelope gave casual morning lessons to the children in her patient Greek, and I did my level best to sit among them and listen to her stories without looking at the children directly.

  After one such lesson I cut my hair and threw a clump of it toward the ocean, and though the wind blew most of it landed on the rocks, it was a powerful moment. Penelope took the shears and fixed a spot in the back, and then she must have found a way to alert Raymond because he didn’t even glance at it when he arrived for dinner.

  My time in Albania forced me to sit under their scrutiny, our quarters close enough that they must have spent hours walking around the camp in order to exhaust the topic.

  I’d like to go to Manisa, to see Niobe in the cliff, for Niobe defied the gods when she presented the fortune of her loins to the city of Thebes and the gods struck them down, her seven boys and seven girls killed before them all. And then Niobe—who really should have known better, that sort of thing happening all the time—wept until the gods shrugged and turned her into a stone that remains even today, seeping rainwater, denying her even the comfort of death.

  “Constantinople by nightfall,” Penelope calls out, stretching out with a strange pelvic thrust that comes off somehow both morbid and crude. The Hippocampus was set to arrive earlier but slowed to bump an old junker into port. We have to shout at each other over the noise of the other boat’s failing engine. Penelope wraps a deck blanket around her as if the noise is a physical assault. “What’s that?”

  “To Manisa! Niobe!”

  “Manisa! Why not a nice bed! Dinner to the room!”

  “We could hire a driver!”

  The junker’s engine sputters and quits. “Absolutely not,” Penelope says in the strange silence.

  “You could come with me, before you see your brother. It would be fun.”

  She observes my hand, which has come to fall on her thigh.

  I have a brief but compelling fantasy of slipping between the hull of the Hippocampus and the junker we’re pushing into port, the delicious feeling of my body pressed to the edge of witness before being crushed into simple oblivion. The thought bobs alongside us for a while and sinks in our slow wake. We will have Constantinople by nightfall, another city of children living to spite the dead.

  Max thinks fondly of Elizabeth as he memorizes a list of things he will accomplish
in her absence

  First there would be improved calisthenic and weight training for the girls. That was the most important item, and crucial for his work. He would look over the piano accompaniment and ensure that Trella had enough alternates, and he would talk to her about the changes to the curriculum while he was at it.

  He meant to research a proper nutrition schedule. Lately he had begun to suspect that the very young and very old had different needs, and found that he himself could subsist on less and less. Surely the girls would benefit from heartier portions.

  There were miscellaneous duties as well: he wanted to arrange a mountain trip after spring recital; the lake was too filthy to take the girls. He needed to consider new choreography for summer and organize the chorale program, perhaps around Verdi and Gounod, and reform the kitchen area to include space for a tea service. If he focused, he could do it all before Elizabeth returned later that week.

  He found Trella at the piano in the rehearsal room, her white gloves folded beside her on the seat. She had confessed once that she found her fingers to be too stubby and so insisted on the gloves anytime she wasn’t actively playing the piano; apparently she was soothed by the sight of the white keys lengthening her fingers, which explained the many hours she spent practicing as a child, when most children were happier to go out and play. Max was charmed by her insecurity and her adaptable nature, and besides, her fingers really were somewhat short and the gloves gave them a good look.

  She was marking something on the page when he walked in, and seemed in no rush to finish the thought before she looked up to acknowledge him.

  “Herr Merz,” she said.

  He sat down beside her on the bench. “Frau Venneberg, I trust you are passing a satisfactory afternoon.”

  “Very much so, thank you. The girls were a little tired from their morning exercise, so I let them take the rest of the hour.”

  “That’s precisely what I wanted to address.”

  She had been altering dynamics on the sheet music, he noticed, pulling everything back to subtler phrasing. He handed over her gloves and waited for her to slip them back on.

  “I have a theory I’ve begun to pursue in earnest,” he said once she had them on again. “You’ve heard me speak of it in the past.”

  “The one about giving the girls lots of muscular wrinkles to smooth out the wrinkles in their brains?”

  He cringed. “The idea that physical strength can better serve them in the higher arts and in a mental capacity, yes. I’d like you to incorporate some elements of my theory into your classes as well.”

  “But Herr Merz, I only accompany the dancers, I could never change Frau Lang’s orders. Unless you’re referring to chorale, and I can’t imagine what you would have them do then.”

  He thought of Frau Lang, who had shouldered the burden of beginning and advanced classes in Elizabeth’s absence, teaching the school’s forty students with a spirited charm. The three of them had managed well enough, though reserves were stretching a bit thin.

  “Chorale is a lost hour of their day,” he said. “Think of ways to get a little more movement into those moments. They could do lunges while windmilling their arms, or swing bodily from the waist. While they performed their vocal warm-ups they could also warm up with toe touches or push-ups.”

  “Push-ups!”

  “Or swinging leg lifts.”

  “Should I purchase a singlet?”

  He hated her laughter but controlled himself. Any idea would meet its detractors at first. Ignorance needed to be set straight.

  “Physical activity on the individual level only benefits the future of the world,” he said. “You would be well advised to find its benefits for yourself as well.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “You’re describing the Müller technique, yes? I read of it last summer—”

  He stood from the bench a little more quickly than he intended, disturbing the balance and forcing her to reach for the piano with two hands, her gloves slipping against the rail. Flustered, he bowed to her and picked up her pages from where they had scattered on the floor. “I am not describing the Müller technique,” he said, replacing the music, trying to find its proper order. “Damned pages. You don’t number them?”

  “They are numbered,” she said quietly. “On the bottom.”

  He threw the pages down. “This is my own technique,” he insisted, his finger quavering a few inches from her lovely thin mouth. “Swinging leg lifts,” he said. “Or toe touches.” He bid her a good morning and left her to tidy her mess.

  Paris walks the grounds at Oldway, which is permanently under the kind of endless renovation that can be endured only by the wealthy

  Gilbert took the Pommery Cup, flying a thousand miles on a Rhône motor. Paris found only a few sentences on the man’s achievement in the middle of a longer article about recent feats of aviation, but it was enough to distract him with thoughts of his own future as a flying ace. Daydreaming was much more entertaining than reading the rest of the piece, which had turned to concerns for the safety of pilots and passengers, dismissal of the industry masked in a false concern for its pioneering few. Paris hated these cynics of progress, sour types who believed that they were owed an exceptional life and had grown impatient waiting for the hour it would arrive. Most salesmen had this precise attitude.

  But simple salesmen failed to see that real success, lasting success, required industry so steady, so free of doubt and reflection that the inventors had to build machines out of themselves. Paris was only a formal acquaintance to hard work, but he knew this to be true. His father’s friends claimed that he continued working even after he had expired; on the fateful day, his nurse found him slumped over his desk, pointing cadaverously toward a folder holding the unorganized plans for something his partners couldn’t quite piece together until a man named Whitehill logged in the patent office his blueprints for the vibrating shuttle. Whitehill won the patent by virtue of being alive, but destroyed this singular advantage when he was found quite dead off the road near Roussillon, the spokes of his bicycle glinting in the afternoon sun. It was a spiritual victory for the Singers, who looked to the future even in death.

  His father was prolific across categories, but tended to tire quickly of his creations. Paris as an infant was left in the care and attention of a catalog of sisters. The girls crowded over him from the day of his birth, their eyes an irregular column of unpolished jewels twinkling on the perimeter of his entire life.

  He remembered feeling jealous of the girls. They were expected only to marry well and live as best they could, while he had the weight of the future. He sought for himself the comfort of successful partnership, but found in Lillie another set of disapproving eyes. Lillie hated Florida and hated him for bringing her there and forcing her to raise four girls in swamp heat, a thick layer of sweat under their high-necked shifts. They were all unhappy with him until the moment he packed up and left for Europe.

  He tried his hand at a few halfhearted inventions, serums for sickly children and similar, always contextualizing his own meager success by reminding himself that sweet syrup was well and good but not quite as useful to the future of the world as mechanized thread. He saw between himself and his father an impossible divide, a canyon so broad and unreal he could think of it only in spiritual terms: he was the mortal descendant of a god, Tantalus betraying the secrets of the divine.

  His attraction to Isadora was only natural. Men sometimes asked him how he could stand to manage a strong-willed woman, and Paris would sidestep the question, saying that all women were strong-willed in their way and that some were only more subtle than others. But the truth was that Isadora’s industry was precisely what interested him in the first place. When he first saw her perform, he felt transfixed by a thousand moving parts. He wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she had picked him up and draped him like a mantle over her shoulders. She seemed impossibly strong, and he felt impossibly light.

  Isadora gave him the balance he n
eeded to focus on the things that most interested him. He found he actually enjoyed keeping up the family home at Oldway, its garden paths and halls, the feathered joints of its cornices and its wide stone floors. He liked catching himself in its broad mirrors, seeing in them a man always between tasks. He supervised the staff he hired to cook and clean the silver and keep wood in the fire and repair the foundation, which always seemed to have some problem. By the dumb luck of his birth, he was perched above the entire enterprise, occupied with a series of petty problems, the value of a single teaspoon gone missing or the question of paint for the carriage house or the maintenance of the horse-drawn carriages themselves, which he had the men keep up with oil and polish despite the fact that he surely would never use them again unless Lillie sent the girls for the summer and the little ones wanted to play pretend. But that wouldn’t happen, he reasoned; his wife always knew when to leave him well enough alone and anyway had no doubt surmised by now that he was cursed.

  Every morning he spent an hour walking the property with his notebook, careful to mark down any opportunity to improve. His butler was cool and efficient, his chef good with last-minute needs. His gardener was easygoing, and willing to talk for hours on the finer points of polished stone.

  Of course he was annoyed with Isadora for not coming off the island with him, but he reasoned that she would see his way soon enough. He was relieved, actually; without her, he could sometimes go a full minute without thinking of the children, two if he was well distracted by his surroundings. Lately he was spending more time with his art collection, working methodically through the endless portraits, his sculpture garden, the artifacts from bygone eras in watercolor and oil. He passed his time like this, praying for the morning he would wake to find that the past few months had only been a dream, or rather a selective sort of nightmare, that he would wake to find that Gilbert had still won the cup, but the rest of it had been his worst invention yet.